


Freshwater Memories

by superheroresin



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Car Accidents, Flashbacks, M/M, Magical Realism, Memory Loss, Mutual Pining, Orphan!Steve, Slow Burn, Urban Fantasy, mentions of near-drowning, river spirit!Bucky, swimming lessons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2018-12-17 03:52:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 50,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11843430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superheroresin/pseuds/superheroresin
Summary: Steve hasn’t been back to his family’s cottage for years, ever since the car accident took both his parents and his childhood memories. His therapist seems to think it’s a good idea for him to get out of the city for a while, so Steve decides it's time to fix it up. He remembers a lot of things when he’s finally arrives, smells the fresh grass, hears the whisper of the trees, and the familiar warmth of a home away from home. The river outside is familiar too, only Steve can’t quite remember the imaginary friend he invented from it, when he needed one the most.The river remembers him though, and will be damned if it watches his old friend sulk in loneliness instead of play with him, like he used to.





	1. Edge of Condemned

**Author's Note:**

> This work was written for the Stucky Library Big Bang 2017! 
> 
> This is the second time I've written for the SBB, with last year's big bang my first foray into fanfiction. I've met so many incredible people, and had a chance to collaborate with amazing artists and writers on all kinds of projects since then! 
> 
> For this year's bang, my fic was selected by artists [@koreanrage](https://koreanrage.tumblr.com/) and [@milollita](https://milollita.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Koreanrage illustrated the beautiful header and two additional scenes, while Milollita used papercraft to bring a precious moment between Steve and Bucky to life in three dimensions! I was so inspired and so unbelievably grateful that my writing managed to inspire such stunning artwork! Overall this has been the sort of experience that fandoms are built on, making new friends, working towards a common goal, and celebrating the love of these two iconic characters. I hope you enjoy! 
> 
> Special thank you to [Queenofthewips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilithduvare/pseuds/queenofthewips), my absolutely unbelievably talented and dedicated beta reader!

**[Header Artwork by[@Koreanrage](http://koreanrage.tumblr.com/post/164333090550/first-two-pieces-for-my-collaboration-on) for the Stucky Library Big Bang 2017!]**

Steve crunches up the overgrown path, the long grass pulling at the cuffs of his ratty jeans, and tries not to think about his parents. Sarah and Joseph Rogers have been dead for ten years; it’s high time for him to move on.

Of course it's hard to do that when he has to drive all the way down from Brooklyn to make some much needed repairs on their beloved summer cottage. He’s been avoiding the chore for months — okay, _years_ — until his insurance agent finally gave him an ultimatum: condemn the property and write it off as a loss or fix it. If he does nothing, he’ll lose his coverage altogether, which would make the property taxes skyrocket. He’s already paying too much for a cottage he never wanted to see again as it is.

Before Steve could consider letting his parents’ dream home simply default into the category of no-longer-his-problem, his therapist doubled down on his need to take some time away from his day job as handyman/property manager/human doormat for the folks living in his building.

“You don’t need to be their dancing monkey,” she informed him tightly as soon as she spotted the cycling chimp doodle he had penciled into his notebook. He tried to deny it at first, but there it was in black and white. Steve needed to fix something for himself for a change, needed to get outside of his comfort zone, and apparently a road trip from bustling Brooklyn to isolated Buchanan, Virginia was the way to get there.

 _Renting it out is always an option,_ he thinks as he steps up the groaning wood stairs and shoves the skeletal remains of a potted plant away from the front door. Put it up on Airbnb and let it actually make money instead of burning a hole in his monthly income. The James River runs nearby and in the last few years it's become popular for young people to do one of those innertube beer crawls in the summer for miles down the snaking waterway.

Steve slides his key — old, smooth and worn out — into the tarnished lock, and finds the tumblers sticky with disuse. _Yet another thing to fix,_ he thinks. What a pain. It’s a good thing he has a tool box in his truck and the hardware store is only a ten minute drive into town.

The door requires a hard shove with his shoulder to pop open and when it releases he winds up stumbling inside with a surprised shout. “Oh shit…” he whispers into the darkness. He’s going to need a way, _way_ bigger toolbox.

The cottage is a comfortable size, with the kitchen and living room right up front and two bedrooms in the back with a single bathroom in between. There is a fat, lumpy brick fireplace with a wide hearth that takes up a whole wall in the living room. The word _cozy_ floats to the surface of his hazy memory and he knows that's the word his mom had used to describe it.

Steve doesn't remember what it used to look like, but now it’s a complete wreck. He takes a few careful steps inside then glances up quickly to make sure nothing dangerous hangs from the ceiling. All he finds are silken cobwebs, which drift lazily in the sour air, still disturbed after the front door opened for the first time in a decade. Steve figures he'll have a lot of spiders to apologize to when all was said and done.

The floorboards are warped and peeling up from the subfloor, planks split and broken, and stained dark, muddy brown from water damage. The ceiling has half a dozen similar stains where the roof had obviously failed. Steve coughs at the scent of mildew, and adds respirators to his mental checklist for his inevitable trip to the hardware store. The last thing he needs is to risk triggering his latent asthma while he’s up here by himself.

“Should have just had you condemned,” he grumbles at the floor, digging the toe of his boot between two broken slats and into the gritty river sand between them. He knew it’d be bad, but he hadn’t anticipated a complete, floor-to-ceiling remodel. Ten years of neglect shouldn’t be enough to cause so much damage all by itself. Steve frowns as a memory resurfaces, and an old resentment bubbles up as the pieces stitch back together in his mind, repairing the records of his past.

It had been the first summer he hadn’t returned to the cottage, the first summer he had spent as an orphan. His foster mother had received a call from their old neighbor that the James River had jumped its bank, flooded the cottage in a freak summer storm.

Mrs. Wilson had been at a loss for what to do, so she hired a local contractor to make sure the cottage wouldn’t get condemned and that was that. Steve felt guilty for months over the money she had spent just to make sure the place was still standing. It wasn't her summer home after all. It wasn't even really Steve’s since his parents had been the ones obsessed with getting away from New York every summer — not him.

Steve remembers wishing that the storm had managed to flatten the entire cottage. He had been only twelve at the time, and such silly fantasies were easier to entertain than trying to understand he’d never see his mom or dad again.

Steve finally moves further into the cottage, letting the front door hang open on its cranky hinges. The windows are dingy and caked with dust so thick that the light struggles through the front panes. One of them has a hole punched through it, the glass scattered across a couch that looks like a wild animal got into the stuffing. Dead leaves and mud is gathered along the baseboards, and slats from the wood-paneled walls have all nearly fallen, hanging on at their corners with struggling, rusted nails. The little carpet in the middle of the floor is nothing but a smear under a rotted coffee table.

And that’s just the living room.

Steve walks over what’s left of the creaking boards, pokes his head into the kitchen, and finds it just about as well off. The fridge is standing open, the stove rusted, the sink full of mud from a backed up drain. He’ll have to unhook all the 220v appliances before he turns the power back on, but at least the water pressure is still surprisingly strong when he tries the tap. “At least that’s something,” he says to himself, but the sink doesn't drain so that's a whole other concern.

Hopefully the toilet still works. He’s been on the road for hours and starts to tap his foot when the urge to pee settles in.

Steve checks what he assumes had been his parents’ bedroom first. Like the couch in the living room, the furniture has likely been a comfy home for an entire family of forest critters over the years. He picks up a faded photo from the dresser, the only one he’s come across so far at his family’s summer home, and gives a disappointed huff when he sees it’s nothing more than a picture of a river rock.

The memory taps him on the shoulder so politely he isn’t even surprised when the flashback unfurls.

 

> _His mother watches him from a cheap folding chair set up on the porch as he climbs the steps home after one of his many trips down to the water’s edge. She’s amused but attentive when Steve explains how precious it is. He shows her the veins of precious gems within the smooth gray stone that only appear when it’s wet and the light hits it just right. A secret treasure that only water can reveal, or a message written for the eyes of the sun only. Like the One Ring, he argues._
> 
> _She suggests he set it against the corner of the railing so that the sun bounces off the vertical beam and he can get a better shot of the pearlescent veins. After he takes his photo, she bundles him into the car and they head straight to the little drug store in town where she has it developed immediately, before the rest of the film roll is even finished._
> 
> _Sarah Rogers treats the whole exercise like Steve has just discovered his calling, a prodigy photographer with an eye for finding the mystical within the mundane._

Steve frowns as the memory starts to fray around the edges, and he can’t recall actually finding the stone, or when. There had been some kind of conversation at the time. He remembers a brief argument, defending how fine the stone was, how perfect and how secretly colorful.

Had he been talking with his mother at the time? He can’t remember anymore, but he doesn’t think so. Steve has suspected for a while that he had been a little spoiled as an only child, knowing already that every time he showed interest in anything Sarah was there with an encouraging word and prideful boasts to his father.

Steve’s brief smile is spent as he comes to the end of the photo’s story, and he’s more disappointed by that small roadblock than he should be. Just another memory of his childhood that vaporized along with the front end of their Forrester when they got in that accident.

 _Kids are stupid,_ he thinks and tosses the photo aside.

His own bedroom looks like it has survived the years relatively well. The windows are all in one piece and the little twin bed with Army soldiers waging war across the bedspread is still tucked into the corner. Steve picks up one of his old summer toys, recognizing the gaudy patriotic hero immediately. “Good to see you, Cap,” he says to it and huffs out a cynical little laugh.

Kids are _really_ stupid, putting faith in cheesy heroes like Captain America.

Steve tosses the toy back onto the dusty comforter and suddenly he remembers this room. It’s not a discrete memory like when his mother encouraged him to photograph his treasured rock but an immediate familiarity with every inch of the space around him. It’s a little disorienting at first, like an extreme case of deja vu, and then he isn’t quite sure what he had forgotten in the first place. Steve looks around again, recognizing his own dresser, his own curtains. It’s all dingy and faded, but now it actually belongs to him, no longer the stranger’s bedroom he had walked into.

Steve glances suspiciously back down at Captain America, the stern set of his chin giving the tiny plastic man an awfully smug look. Info dumps don’t happen often these days, not since his slow recovery began right after the accident, but he tells himself it’s just a coincidence.

Steve braces one hand on the mattress when he kneels down to peek beneath the bed, and the crumbling foam mattress immediately releases a cloud of dust. The whole thing would definitely have to be thrown out, like the rest of the furniture, which had never been anything special to begin with. Steve tosses aside the bed skirt and finds the flat box, exactly where he now expects it to be. Even though it snags on some of the uneven floorboards he manages to extract it from under the bed without the ancient cardboard coming apart in his hands.

Inside are all the art supplies he had forgotten about after the accident. A full set of barely used Faber-Castell color pencils, a 24-count box of Derwent chalk pastels, half a dozen pads of Bristol paper in different sizes and a fat, half-full sketchbook. _Mom really_ had _spoiled him,_ he thinks. Steve has been looking into taking drawing classes at the City College and knows these supplies are way too expensive for a twelve year old. The sketchbook has some heft to it, with thick, professional grade paper and a hardback binding wrapped in black fabric.

Steve tucks it under his arm and moves on to the bathroom without looking inside its pages.

The one tiny window in the bathroom is nearly entirely shrouded by the overgrown trees that marched right up against the back of the cottage, and without thinking he tries to turn on the overhead light. There’s a sharp, electrical snap and a shower of sparks fall from the fixture in the ceiling. Steve slams the lightswitch back off and coughs as the smell of burning hair fills the tiny bathroom.

“Good job, asshole,” he says, waving his hand around to disperse some of the smoke. Apparently, no one ever shut off the electricity after all. It’s a miracle he didn’t arrive to a burnt out husk of a building. “You probably just blew the entire circuit...”

Thankfully, the plumbing still works well enough for him to relieve himself, a matter of no small urgency since the damn lightswitch incident startled his need to piss to critical. Afterwards, he heads back out to his truck with his mental checklist of all the things he needs to start making the repairs necessary to renew his god damned insurance.

In reality, the cottage isn’t much worse off than the apartment building in Brooklyn he had inherited at the same time. His parents left him with two incredibly expensive pains in the ass to manage, and by the time he came into his inheritance he needed to practically become a fulltime handiman. It had been just as well since his career in hospitality management went absolutely nowhere after he graduated. At least the cottage has updated plumbing, even if it is clogged, and updated electrical, even if he had blown a fuse somewhere in the circuit. The cement foundation is solid, the main support beams untouched by water. In Brooklyn this place would fetch a mint.

 _Good bones,_ his mother would say. Still, it’s going to be a long couple of weeks.

 _That’s strange,_ he thinks. He hadn’t expected to remember much of anything, but nearly every room triggers something he had lost in the accident. Yet, the old, disordered thoughts have slotted themselves comfortably into place like something in Steve's mind has been keeping their seats warm. Somehow it's better this way, despite the extra spike of anxiety it causes every time his mother’s voice or his father's laughter returns effortlessly to his mind.

He heads back down the path to where he parked off the gravel road that leads to the small neighborhood of riverside cottages in unincorporated Buchanan. He reaches up to pull open his truck’s front door and he realizes he’s forgotten to inspect the dock.

Behind the cottage is a tiny gravel path (probably vanished in the underbrush by now,) that leads to the property’s private dock. He should check to see if it’s rotted away by now or is just in need of a few repairs, since that’d be a huge perk for vacationers. Drunk, frat boy innertubers love stuff like that.

Steve makes his way behind the cottage, reminding himself to add shears to his shopping list as he struggles past the overgrown brush, then blurts out a few choice swears when he rams his shin into the long forgotten woodpile that is apparently hiding behind an old mound of leaves. He scrunches his eyes shut as he rubs his stinging leg and presses on, hoping it isn't a sign of things to come.

Steve finally passes under a few slightly more well-behaved trees and finds his way on the short trail that leads towards the river. He can smell it almost immediately, that sweet, cool scent of fresh water, and can hear the lazy hum of river flies droning past the treeline. He steps over a scraggly bush and the rest of the world seems to go quiet around him. The sprawling, dark blue water lazily bends its way around the edge of his family’s property line, creating a natural switchback of forest to give each home in the neighborhood a perfectly private relationship with the water.

The sides of the bank are steep, about ten feet down to the waterline in the summer, lined with large, shiny rocks choked with ivy. The river is wide, about thirty feet across in some areas, and deep, with strong, dark currents just below the surface. Wikipedia told him that it's great for swimming in the summer and fishing in the winter, but somehow Steve doesn’t think he ever did much of either.

Steve steps out onto the dock that sticks out like a tongue into the wide, dark James River and takes in a sight that he suddenly realizes is actually familiar. The river is the only sound around him, chattering loudly over the smooth, ivy draped stones, swirling into eddies around the support pylons of the dock. The sun that breaks through the trees beams down in fat golden bars of light, gelding the tip of every wave and ripple. Had he actually forgotten this? It seems to him that standing here, on this dock, over this river, is the most natural thing in the world.

“Long time no see,” Steve says out loud, then gives an annoyed little huff at how much he’s been talking to himself already. He knew the trip would be a little lonely, but even though Clint had offered to tag along he had chosen to come by himself for a reason. It’s something he was supposed to do a long time ago, taking care of this long delayed responsibility.

 _Better late than never,_ he thinks, and takes in a deep, calming breath. It’s a bit early for him to be cracking up, already having partial conversations with himself, out loud, for god and everyone to hear. At least it really is peaceful here, away from his hectic life in Brooklyn and all his needy tenants. Maybe he could finally understand what his parents saw in coming out here every damn summer.

Maybe, if it hadn’t been what killed them and left Steve deaf in one ear. _Fuck._

Steve looks down and finds a dark, polished river rock, perched on the edge of the dock like a punctuation mark, and has the sudden urge to sit, and allow his legs to dangle over the quiet river. Instead, he kicks the stone off the edge with the toe of his dirty boot. It makes a satisfying plop into the dark water, and he turns to leave.

At least the dock is in perfect shape, he figures, already moving on. He’ll probably just re-nail some of the boards and make sure there is no dry rot setting in. He steps back onto the gravel path and hears a loud clatter behind him, turns, and sees a shiny, wet stone lying there, identical to the one he just kicked away.

“Huh,” he says, and leaves it be. He’d been distracted so he probably just hadn’t noticed there were two.


	2. Buchanan

Once Steve climbs aboard his truck, he catches sight of the sketchbook left on the seat. He had tossed it in before heading out to check the dock, and now wonders why he had thought to take it with him in the first place. He drags his fingers over the rough, water-warped cover and remembers that it had gotten wet one summer when he had been outside, drawing by himself on the edge of the dock.

He thinks about that shiny stone he kicked into the river and wonders if it’s the same one that his mother had treasured in his silly photo. Impossible, he realizes. He doesn’t know why but the thought makes him sad.

“Get it together, Rogers,” he chides himself, then starts up his truck, pulls off of the gravel road, and heads into town.

The hardware store is small and old fashioned ( _charming,_ another one of his mother’s words come to mind) but they have an excellent selection of tools, wood, and even some pre-packaged kits for fixing the exact same type of interior wood paneling that lines the cottage’s living room. Steve gratefully picks up a few DIY roof repair kits after checking his mental list, then remembers to grab a pair of shears for the overgrown forest. He fills up so many carts that the owner of the hardware store lets him pull into the small loading dock on the other side of the block.

When he’s done strapping down the last of his plywood in the bed of his truck the owner comes back outside to give him his receipt and his credit card. He’s lanky with narrow features and hair the color of chrome, and his pale blue eyes look like they might always be a little red around the edges, like he cries a lot. His hands are rough, the hands of a man who stubbornly refuses to settle down even after he’s reached a certain age, and he wears a heavy leather apron with the name Erik embroidered elegantly near the top. “You’re all set Mr. Rogers,” he says in his well hidden Eastern European accent.

“Ah, please, call me Steve.”

“Steve?” The man repeats with a confused frown. “You wouldn’t happen to be Sarah and Joe’s Stevie?”

“Er...” He never knows what to say when it turns out people used to know his parents. That means they likely knew him too, but he’d have no way of remembering them. Plus, he’s pretty sure no one ever called him ‘Stevie.’ “Yeah. I’m fixing up their old cottage. Going to rent it out or something.”

The man blinks, momentarily stalled to think, then tucks his big, calloused hands back into the pockets of his apron. “I’ll be damned. You wait just one minute —” he insists, and disappears into the shop leaving Steve to wait awkwardly, standing in the back of his pickup. Soon enough the man returns with two annoyed looking teenagers in tow. “You might remember the twins from when you were little? They were just babies then.” Erik has gone a little red in the face as he clearly resists the urge to reminisce about his children, then clears his throat and points. “Wanda. Pietro. If you need any help fixing up that old place let me know, and they can come help out for a little pocket money. The number’s on the receipt. Pietro,” Erik says, singling out his disinterested looking son with a quick elbow to his ribs. The teenager barks and steps forward, like his name was just shouted out at roll call. “Introduce yourself.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Pietro immediately recites. Oddly enough, Pietro’s hair is silver, just like his father’s. Maybe the men in their family all have a touch of albinism in their heritage.

The daughter’s hair is rich and dark auburn, and she shrugs shyly when she echoes her brother, “Pleased to meet you.”

“Oh,” Steve begins. He’s definitely been there before. His parents may have spoiled his childish fantasies of becoming some kind of artist, but now he knows he’s had many discussions just like this one before, when parents awkwardly try to offer up their kids’ summer vacations as work for hire in the small town. “I uh, I really was planning on going at it alone. But thank you for the offer! I’ll call if I need an extra pair of hands.”

Erik nods gravely. “They help out around the shop all the time. Wanda is the engineer, she once built an entire set of kitchen cabinets on her own. Pietro is stupid, but he’s fast.”

Steve bawks at the casual insult, but Pietro just laughs. “It’s a fair tradeoff,” Pietro reassures him, flashing one of those cocky grins that only teenagers are ballsy enough to pull off. “It’s okay if you have to do everything twice when you still finish it in one third the time.”

“That’s a terrible philosophy,” Wanda says, rolling her eyes. She must be the older of the two, even though they look about the same age. No, Steve amends. Erik said they were twins.

Steve thanks Erik again before he heads back to the cottage, truck bed full of supplies to get started. Along the way he already reconsiders the offer for extra help. It might not be so bad to get some extra help with the really boring stuff, like taping off the trim when he paints or replacing all the switch plates. He starts making another checklist in his mind after he parks, and it takes him another several hours to unload everything from his truck and get it safely inside.

It’s nearly dark by the time he locks up his truck after his last trip for the sketchbook he had left on the front seat.

When he goes to lock his front door for the evening his fingers linger on the old, tarnished deadbolt.

“Safe as houses,” he murmurs with an amused huff.

There’s no real point to lock up since the window is broken, but it’s weird to walk away from an unlocked front door for the evening, right? Surely people lock their front doors in the evening in most of the country; it’s not just because he’s from Brooklyn. Steve doesn’t know why he’s struggling with such a silly question and throws the bolt closed. At that moment a loose shard of glass suddenly falls from the broken pane and shatters to pieces on the sill.

The first thing he’ll do tomorrow is deal with that window, he decides, and heads into his bedroom with his pillow and a sleeping bag rolled up under his arm.

The next day Steve wakes up suddenly and stares at his strangely familiar ceiling for a long time, wondering where all his memories of mornings in the cottage went. Maybe it would require the sounds of his mom and dad, grinding coffee and talking in soft, morning voices about whatever filled the rest of Steve’s childhood summers.

“Where are you…?” He asks his ceiling, not sure if he means his parents or his memories or both. It feels like something is missing, something different than the sharp pain of loss that clings to people years after the death of close family.

It doesn’t take him long to crawl out of his sleeping bag, since his air mattress had all but flattened during the night and the floorboards beneath him felt like sleeping on a bed of spikes. Redoing the floors is close to last on his list of repairs.

He better get started.

Steve spends the first half of the day clearing out the old furniture, cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom, and sweeping up the river silt that gathered in just about every corner of the cottage after the flood. It breaks away in clumps from the walls and between the slats of the floorboards, like it’s aware it overstayed its welcome and is ready to head back out. Afterwards, Steve, heaving and sweaty, tosses the pieces of the old broken couch into the back of his truck. He takes a minute to catch his breath and realizes he’s already had enough. It’s only one o’clock in the afternoon, but sweat sticks his hair to his forehead and his shirt feels like pancake batter against his skin.

He drives into town and makes his very first stop at the junk drop. He tosses out a dozen bulging garbage bags, the shards of the broken living room furniture, his parents’ bed, and just about everything he found moldering away in the dresser drawers and cabinets. He’s practically salivating when he picks up an Italiano sandwich at Luis’s Deli, and devours it in the parking lot when his will fails him. He runs a few more errands in town before heading back to the cottage, and when he finally walks back through the front door he goes straight to his room and collapses on his re-inflated air mattress. It’s only four but he’s too tired to even imagine dealing with anymore cleaning, fixing, or organizing. Maybe he could manage a shower.

Steve squints at the emails that finally finished loading into his inbox on his phone’s too-bright screen and sighs. Maybe.

He goes to bed around nine, and sleeps so hard he wakes up stiff as a board and twice as splintery. How could he have thought this was a good idea? He knows he never liked this stupid cottage even when he was a kid. How could he have possibly thought some repair projects away from the city would be relaxing? Maybe he should just hire Erik’s kids to do the rest of this stupid project while he drinks beer on the dock, like one of the frat boy innertubers.

“The river,” he says with a thoughtful hum.

Steve dresses slowly, having long lost all his Day One pep. He brushes his teeth and tries to stretch out the kinks in his shoulders while going through his mental to do list. He texts Clint to let him know he’s survived night number two in the cottage without being eaten by a bear, before he drops off his phone to charge in his truck. He still doesn’t dare use the power sockets in the cottage, and figures that’s the first thing he needs to tackle now that he’s in the “big things” section of his to do list.

He grabs a Starbucks frappuccino from his cooler in the kitchen sink and a protein bar, plus an apple because he’s not a total wreck, before heading back outside. He had been planning to eat breakfast on the porch, but his feet decide to carry him past the insidious woodpile and through the overgrown brush. He only trips once as he shoves past one particularly aggressive fern and finally breaks free of the treeline to reach the little dock.

The wood feels solid under his boots as he steps down the weathered planks, and he sits down carefully on the edge, letting his feet dangle and feeling a bit childish. It’s still early for the mosquitos to be out, but the current is strong enough to keep up a persistent chatter of water against rocks, even though the trees are silent. Further down river the water is as smooth as glass. Steve pops the top on his cold, sugary coffee and thinks how interesting it is that one part of a river can seem so full of motion while it sits deceptively still only a few yards away.

Steve sets his drink down and scans the treeline on the opposite bank, wondering where the Parkers’ cottage is. They had died too, only a few years after Steve’s parents. He hadn’t thought much about it at the time but they had a baby when Steve had known them. Probably the same age as Wanda and Pietro by now.

Steve wonders if one day that kid will make the same sort of expedition as Steve. Questioning his modern, city life enough to come visit these old relics of their parents’ shared past. He hopes he does, anyway. Like most of the therapeutic tactics Dr. Carter confronts him with, he simultaneously resents the struggle and strives for the challenge.

Steve is still not sure if it has been a mistake to come here, but so far he’s comfortable with the amount he’s remembered and the work he’s accomplished. It’s not quite the same as keeping his apartment held together with duct tape and chewing gum, fetching everything for his tenants from light bulbs to toilet paper. This little cottage might far outlast the sturdy brownstone apartment building Steve’s suffered in the past ten years, still standing peacefully by this river decades after Brooklyn had collapsed under the weight of the housing crisis.

Steve finishes his apple and unwraps the protein bar, chewing the tasteless, compressed fuel while leaning forward on his thighs with his elbows. Even after finishing his breakfast he continues to sit and stare, telling himself that he’s digesting even though he knows procrastination when he sees it.

“Great,” he says. “For some reason I feel the need to point out my own laziness.” Steve frowns and looks down into the water when it splashes suddenly on the rocks below. “And I’m talking to myself,” he adds under his breath, and stands to leave, figuring he may as well get to work.

He stuffs his garbage in his pockets and stops short when he spots a familiar looking rock sitting innocuously on the dock. “Huh,” he says. “You can have this back, buddy.”

Steve kicks the rock with his instep, like a soccer ball. It skitters over the edge of the dock and he hears it strike the water with a resonant splash. He clambers up the few rocks that served as steps down to the dock and gasps in pain when something strikes him hard in the small of his back.

“What the fuck!”

Steve spins around, ready to punch whoever snuck up behind him, only to find himself still very alone. His eyes drop down to the dock, where a shiny wet stone rests. He stares at it for a moment, the perfectly smooth surface glittering in the early sunlight. It looks translucent green, like a chunk of the ocean had gotten mixed up in all this fresh water and was trying to find its way back home. Steve can just make out a vein of glittering white imperfection cutting across the surface.

Just like the photo on his mom’s dresser.

“Nope,” he says, and turns back to the steps, shaking his head. “Nope, nope,” he adds, as if that would make it better. He makes it all the way to the treeline before he stops short. When he reaches to touch the spot on his back that still stings from whatever hit him, his fingers come away damp from where the water soaked into the cotton of his shirt. Steve spins around again, angry, like he had someone to fight.

“Okay,” he says, and marches back down as well as someone can march down broken earth and wobbly stones. He snatches up the river rock and hurtles it out over the water, this time watching it shuttle into the small waves and vanish under the dark blue surface, just before it reached the opposite bank. Steve’s breathing hard, though he isn’t sure why, and his hands seem stuck to his sides in angry fists. He’s planted his feet like he’s ready for a fight and his face almost hurts for how hard he’s frowning.

“Keep the fucking thing,” Steve growls out. “I don’t need this anymore.”

The memory strikes him harder than the stone had.

> _Steve is always lonely when he visits the cottage, too small to play with the kids his age, too old to play with the little kids down the lane, and too sick for it to really matter anyway. He always has allergies when he visits the cottage and hates that he has to spend his entire summer here, where there’s no TV and no bodegas and no comic book stores. He spends all his time with his sketchbook and his water color paper, and anything else he can capture an image with. He is shooed outside enough times that soon he just starts his day on the dock, drawing the river._
> 
> _The conversations are one sided at first, but it doesn't take long for Steve to start translating the curious gurgles and excited splashes as a sort of language. He gets bolder when he realizes the river responds to him, and soon he doesn't worry so much about not being able to swim or his asthma making it difficult to climb the steep rocks down._
> 
> _He tells the river his fears. His dreams. It's really just for fun, since ten year olds don't have many to speak of. The spiders in the woodpile. His new color pencils. If he’ll grow out of his asthma, like his aunt did, or die in his sleep from an attack, like his cousin. The river responds in unpredictable ways. It's never daunted, always playful, but still attentive and never frivolous with Steve's burgeoning emotions. It's just a bit of fun, something to do to spin off those long, lonely summer days._
> 
> _The day Steve falls in is the day the river becomes his best friend._

“What?” Steve whispers, shaking his head in confusion. He focuses back on the water, where the stone finally sank, and tries again to make the pieces fit. He had been a lonely kid with an active imagination. He talked to himself then, a lot like he's been doing since he arrived. Imaginary friends weren't a wholly ridiculous concept. Maybe —

A burble of air interrupts his thought when it breaks the waterline at the opposite bank, and Steve catches his breath.

“No way,” is all he can say before the river rock he had pitched away came hurtling back, and smacks him in the face right between the eyes.


	3. Best Friends

“Rivers can't be friends,” Steve blurts out, when he finally opens his eyes.

“Rude,” says a dazzle of sunlight.

“What?” His eyes can barely process all the green and blue and sunshine around him.

“What?” The stranger echoes, hovering in the halo and continuing to blind Steve completely.

When Steve pushes off the ground his stomach instantly makes him regret it, flopping sideways and threatening to upchuck his simple breakfast.

“Whoa, easy there,” comes the cautious warning, and Steve feels a firm grip on his shoulder that holds him in place while the world spins beneath him. “Sorry about that,” the stranger continues, then betrays his sincere apology with a laugh. “I was just trying to get your attention. Didn’t expect you to lean into it.”

“Asshole,” Steve groans. “Were you the one throwing rocks?” He didn’t think he’d have to kick someone’s ass so soon in Buchanan, but here they are. Just as soon as he can get his feet under himself he’s gonna deck this jackass. Or is he already standing? _Fuck._

“Aw, Steve. I said I was sorry,” the stranger says, and then places a cold hand on Steve’s forehead.

The sickening dizziness fizzles out, and Steve blinks, takes a steadying breath and finally gets a good look at his tormentor. His fucking _gorgeous_ tormentor.

He’s wearing dark, skinny jeans and a tight v-neck tee with the Captain America action figure’s logo on the front in a distressed print — one of those retro 90’s kid sort of things. His hair is chestnut brown and long, playfully tousled. Steve wouldn't have thought he’d be into that sort of thing, but his mouth goes dry when he thinks of running his fingers through it. Steve is so stunned by how good looking the guy is that he forgets he had been planning to take a swing at him. He’s not even a little embarrassed by that.

“Feel a little better now?” the guy asks, squinting suspiciously into Steve’s face as he searches for signs of lingering pain.

Steve doesn't answer, confused by how he could possibly be attracted to this asshole stranger. This guy just hit him in the face with a fucking rock! And he’s really, _really_ close. Because he is still holding Steve by the shoulders.

“Fine!” Steve announces, and pushes out of the guy’s arms. “I’m fine! I guess I hadn’t hit my head as hard as I thought,” he adds, and presses his own palm against his cooled forehead. Why is he suddenly excusing the whole rock throwing situation? The guy’s face scrunches up when he gives Steve an adorable smile, eyes going glittery with mischief.

Adorable? Well, fuck.

“I guess your head was always pretty damn hard,” he teases, and his laughter rings like a bell. “How have you been? You look...bigger.”

...Bigger?

“Oh, shit,” Steve stutters, and realizes he’s been staring. “Did we know each other?” Of course they did. The guy called him by his first name and everything. Now his smile is vanishing, and Steve feels like a jackass so he tries to explain, “I got in an accident, years ago. I forgot a lot of stuff from when I used to come here, with my parents.”

“Sarah and Joe,” the guy says suddenly, his smile bubbling back up, like laughter aching to get out. “Very nice people.”

“Uh, thanks,” Steve replies, giving the guy another once over. He’s probably around Steve’s age, with a sharp jawbone and proud cheeks, playful eyes and lips that are moist and red, like he sucks on them. He has a dimple in his chin.

Steve realizes he’s staring again and wants to die. This is so awkward.

“Look, I’m sorry I’m so…” Steve shakes his head and wants to say stupid. “Confused? It’s just, I don’t remember you. I don’t remember coming here.” He looks over his shoulder to encompass the river and the dock and really the whole riverside neighborhood with his glance. “Not really. I’m just getting snippets here and there now that I’m back. Sorry.”

The guy looks at him with wide eyes, but then shrugs, apparently unbothered by being forgotten. “It’s okay, we never really met like this anyway.” Steve figures he means as adults. They must have played together as kids, a neighbor from another cottage perhaps. Steve beats at his tattered memory like an old rug, hoping for something to fall out, but there just isn't enough there. He doesn't remember this guy. _Too bad…_

The guy motions for Steve to head back up the path into the woods, and Steve obliges, naturally falling into the lead of their little hike. He hadn’t invited him anywhere, let alone back to his house, but somehow the decision has been made that that’s where they head, without a word about it.

“I’m Bucky, by the way,” he says, after they both struggle past the fern at the top of the treeline. “Since I guess you don’t remember.”

“Bucky,” Steve repeats with a snort, and looks back so see his new/old friend give him a sharp look. “Sure, Bucky,” Steve amends. “I guess childhood names stick around sometimes. Erik at the hardware store called me Stevie.”

“Your ma called you Stevie,” Bucky answers lightly, helpfully, like he’s already taken on the task of remembering Steve’s past alongside him. “Joe called you Steve-o, sometimes.”

Steve stops in his tracks, one hand holding a low hanging branch out of the way.

> _“Ready for dinner, Steve-o?” Dad says, shouting over the raised lid of the barbecue. Steve is just heading back from the dock, where he’s been drawing as always, thick sketchbook tucked tightly under one arm…_

“Oh,” Steve breathes out. He makes sure to pass the thick branch to Bucky so that it doesn’t whack him in the face as he passes through behind him. Not that he wouldn’t deserve it, throwing rocks like that from the bushes. So immature. “Thank you,” Steve says, when he remembers his manners. Just because Bucky is a jerk doesn’t mean he has to be one. “I didn’t remember that.”

“Given names are important,” Bucky says, his tone loaded with importance. “Especially names given by people you love. I’ve told you that before, so don’t forget it again.”

Steve rolls his eyes, skirts around the woodpile hiding under the drift of leaves and tangled weeds. So bossy.

“Shit!” Bucky shouts, and hisses in pain when he strikes his shin against the concealed logs. “Coulda warned a fella,” he adds, when Steve snickers.

“People in glass houses,” Steve suggests, leaving off the rest of the saying. He raises his eyebrows, suggesting that Bucky should have known better.

“Damn legs,” Bucky grumbles, and glares down at them as if they are to blame. “Got any food?”

“Um,” Steve says. Bucky switches gears so quickly Steve isn't sure if he's joking. “Some breakfast bars. Apples. Not much.”

“Awesome,” Bucky sighs, visibly relieved as he springs free of the bushes and they make it into the front yard. “You need to trim your bushes.”

What the hell is with this guy? “Be my guest,” Steve grumbles.

“Okay,” Bucky cheerfully agrees. Steve isn't sure if he just didn't pick up on the sarcasm or just chose to ignore it, but somehow that leads to Bucky coming into his parents’ cottage, eating two apples, rifling through the supplies in the livingroom, and then going to work.

Steve can hear the whisk of the shears outside as he gets to work on the electrical situation, following the sound as the day drags on, just to keep an ear on Bucky’s location around the cottage.

He checks all the outlets and switches with a cheap tester he picked up at Lehnsherr’s Hardware, finding only three that need to be replaced. Water had gotten into two of the floor outlets in the living room, corroding the connectors, so Steve adds it to the list of things the river in particular had wrecked, as opposed to the standard passage of time. So far it’s a terribly disappointing scoreboard.

The outlet in the bathroom just looks like it’s trying to do its best impression of the Hellmouth after he burnt out the power so he counts it as a loss without bothering to test it. Luckily none of the 220v outlets have issues so he sets to the next task on his list: the plumbing.

Time feels like it just evaporates as he and Bucky work, while Steve tallies more victories for the river (the rusted out canned food he finds at the bottom of the pantry, the weatherstripping along the bottom of the back door) and makes his list for more things to buy at Lehnsherr’s (oven cleaner, three power sockets, an extra pair of work gloves, for Bucky.)

If he stops to think for too long he gets confused as to how easily Bucky has slotted into what was supposed to be a solitary exercise, so he just keeps up his pace until his alarm goes off around four. Time to head into town before everything closes.

“Bucky?” Steve steps onto the front porch, and swings around the side to see how far Bucky got on his task. The woodpile looked like it had been his first project and was completely free from its blanket of leaves and weeds, which would have been amazing enough for a day’s worth of work but the entire path on the side of the house had also been cleared. Steve could see all the way down to where the fern sat on the edge of the treeline, making the path down to the river.

“Holy shit.”

“Do you like it Steve?” Bucky asks, popping up right in front of Steve’s face so suddenly he cries out in surprise and stumbles back a step or three.

“Holy shit!” Steve gasps. Bucky is gripping the railing of the porch, perched on the edge of it after popping out from underneath the lattice.

“You said that already,” Bucky laughs, and Steve’s face heats. “I know I do a good job cutting a path but you really don't have to flatter me so much.”

“Ah,” Steve says, unable to stay mad at him. “I uh, yeah. It looks amazing, Buck. I can't believe you did this all in just a couple of hours!” And he doesn't even have a spot on him. Steve is a sweaty wreck in comparison.

Bucky frowns. “You never called me Buck before,” he says, and his face twists like he’s not so sure he likes it.

“As far as I know we’ve never even met,” Steve snorts. “I have to go to Lehnsherr’s and pick up some things to keep going. Wanna come?”

Bucky looks surprised, then concerned, then casts his gaze upwards to look at the position of the sun in the sky, like a boyscout insisting he doesn't need a watch. “Better not. Getting late. Lots of work today, and I’m not used to it yet. See you tomorrow?”

“Oh,” Steve says, not sure why he’s suddenly so disappointed. “Yeah sure, later gator.”

> _Later gator!_

Says the memory that slips away before it can tell him anything more. Bucky smiles, and the smile breaks into a laugh. “I’m glad you're back.”

“Me too,” Steve says. Really? Since when? Ugh, he’s such a poser, trying to act like he doesn't hate this dump just to impress a hot guy. “Oh, wait.” He’s such an idiot! Bucky is already heading off, down the trail behind the cottage. “Can I have your number? Which house are you in?”

“Don't have one,” Bucky says over his shoulder, and then he’s gone.

Well. There goes Steve’s pat on the back for getting up the guts to ask for his number. Now who is he going to desperately torture himself over texting in the middle of the night?

“Pathetic, Rogers,” he sighs. “That asshole hit you in the face with a rock…”

He heads to his truck and into town before Lehnsherr’s closes.

That night, he texts Clint that he met an old friend down by the river, so he’s not quite as sad and lonely as Clint keeps emoting when he sends his annoying little check-ins. Since Steve managed to get the power back on before he got to bed, his phone is at 100% the next morning when he finds Clint’s delayed reply.

_> >Did you get his number? _

Oops. Is he really that obvious? Or just that desperate. Steve frowns at the screen and a small voice inside him makes fun of how easy he is.

Goddamn it Clint.


	4. Picking Fights

Steve gets out of bed in such a bad mood that he can see it written all over his face as soon as he catches his reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror. Shitting Clint and his shitting perceptive shit, shit, shit…

He scrubs his face with cold water — aw _fuck,_ he really has to check on that hot water heater today — brushes his teeth and thinks about shaving for a whole fifteen seconds before he tosses his razor back into his toiletries bag and gets dressed. He skips the ice-cold shower altogether. Funny how even in the summer heat of Virginia, cold water is just as intolerable as it had been in Brooklyn when the ancient boiler in the building’s dungeon-like basement finally kicked the bucket.

Steve picks up his breakfast (protein bar, apple, Starbucks frapp) and heads down to the river. It feels good to slowly break the apple apart between his teeth, deliberately chew the protein bar like he’s trying to mix cement in his mouth, and gingerly sip the sugary drink. He’s forcing himself to slow down, to watch the river under his feet and try to spot water skeeters closer to the rocks.

Steve puts the cap back on his drink, sets it down next to his apple core and empty wrapper. His back aches and his thighs burn like he’s done a thousand lunges, but he already feels his bad mood bleeding away. He can't put off work any longer, so he clambers to his feet, gathers his trash and takes one last look at the river. “Good morning,” he says with a relaxed sigh.

Steve turns and almost collides face first into Bucky. “Morning!” 

“Gah!” Steve shouts, and fumbles to hang onto his glass bottle. “What the hell! How long have you been standing there?”

“Just got here,” Bucky cheerfully replies. The sun is in his eyes so he’s squinting slightly. “Thought you heard me, saying good morning and all.”

“I didn’t mean —” Steve stops to question how much he wants to hurt his own pride by admitting he had been talking to himself. Bucky cocks his head to the side, waiting for Steve to finish his thought. He’s wearing a Ninja Turtles shirt today, grey and tight with the same distressed retro print as before. Really pulling on those nostalgic heartstrings. “Nevermind,” Steve says, only a little annoyed with himself now. “Want to help me fix the hot water heater?”

“Hot water?” Bucky scrunches his nose like he smells something foul. “I can clear the gutters.”

“What? Are you kidding, that's dangerous!” So apparently Steve is a mother hen now.

Bucky winks at him and turns back to the trail leading up. “I’m good with gutters,” he explains. 

Maybe he's a local handyman? Or maybe he's just used to fixing up his parents’ cottage the same way Steve learned to fix up the Brooklyn apartment building. Short of money and long on time. With that hair and his clothes, Steve figures Bucky for the kind of guy that doesn't really have ambitions for a professional career. Just goes with the flow, like seeing an old friend across the river one day and deciding to help him fix up his house. Maybe he’s not a total jerk.

Bucky sets to work on the gutters while Steve breaks the lock off the hot water heater shed. It’d rusted shut and he has no idea where the key might be (even though he suspects it’s one of the dozen keys he threw out when he emptied the junk drawers in the kitchen. His parents were packrats, apparently.) Steve groans when he gets a good look inside. Not only was the shed cloudy with cobwebs (holy _bejeezus_ that’s a lot of spiders!) but the tank had clearly failed some time ago. All the hardware on the bottom is thick with rust and mud, and the pipes leading into the house from the top aren't even hooked up. _It's just as well,_ Steve thinks. He already figured it’d be safer to cap the gas line and install an electric water heater, since gas is a huge danger when flooding snuffs out the pilot light. 

Steve spends the rest of the morning carefully dismantling it, caps the gas line himself, and tallies the water heater as another expense against the river, since the flooding ruined the old one in the first place.

Bucky asks Steve to bring him back a sandwich instead of coming with him into town, and after seeing the miracle work his old/new friend has made with the gutters Steve figures it's the least he can do. After placing an order for the new water heater at Lehnsherr’s, he picks up a pair of turkey pesto subs, a big bag of chips, some salsa, and a whole bag of apples. 

The oven and the stove are also gas, so he picks up microwave burritos, then has to go back into the store to ask where in town he can buy a microwave. Erik laughs when Steve walks back through his front door at Lehnsherr’s, and reminds Steve that he can always send Pietro with any orders.

“It's not like I don't know where you live,” he says with a wink. “I’ll open a tab for you, if you like.”

“Sure,” Steve agrees, “the drive is the closest thing I get to a break, but I guess it could come in handy. Thanks,” he adds, and by now his bad mood is a distant memory. Maybe getting all this nature and hard work isn't such a bad thing. “Oh, speaking of knowing everyone in town, do you know where Bucky lives?”

“Bucky,” Erik repeats, curling his mouth in confusion. “Bucky?”

“Yeah, guy about my age, dark hair, grey eyes. He probably lives on the riverfront, in one of the cottages.”

Erik shrugs helplessly. “I suppose I don’t know everyone,” he repeats. “Name like that I’m sure I’d remember. I think folks used to call the town _Bucky_ back in the day. Short for Buchanan.” 

Strange, but he supposes it’s true that even in small towns there are always new people to meet. Buchanan has somewhere around fifteen hundred people, according to the faded sign on the side of the highway Steve saw when he drove in. Just enough to lose one, cheerful kid.

Steve forgets he needs a new air mattress, so he laughs at himself when he pulls into his parking spot off the main road and uses his new tab right away, ordering a queen sized deluxe sleeper. He may as well get one big enough so that his feet don’t hang off the edge. 

Steve finds Bucky sitting on the porch, leaning against the railing half asleep, arms folded tightly against his chest. He sighs when Steve hops up the steps and unfurls like a stretching cat. 

“Took you long enough,” Bucky says in a grumble, but he’s smiling, happy to see him. That thought makes Steve’s heart thump, so he coughs before his face ignites in a whoosh of flames. 

“You could've gone inside,” Steve teases easily, like it’s just a thing he does with pretty guys. “Door’s unlocked.”

“Rude to go in without being invited,” Bucky says with a shrug, and doesn’t move to follow Steve past the doorframe. “Last time I was here I kinda made a mess.”

Steve pauses just inside, and stares into the dim living room while he wills his memories to give him just one shred of evidence that he had a young friend with chestnut colored hair and such easy smiles, in those long lost summers. A kid that’s a crack shot with river rocks, and likes Ninja Turtles and Captain America. 

“Damn,” Steve says. He should have known better; his memory loss has never worked like that, but he’s still disappointed. “Well, it doesn’t really matter anymore. The river flooded and wrecked it all anyway. Whatever you did when we were kids is nothing compared to that mess. I’ve actually been keeping score.”

“Um,” Bucky says, still too cautious to follow Steve so he rolls his eyes and waves him inside.

“Come on, already,” he gently chides. “You’re invited. The one good thing about memory loss, I can’t blame you for anything you did when we were kids. You can help me break down my old bedroom.”

“Okay,” Bucky says, ever agreeable, and follows Steve past the kitchen and down the hall, pausing only a moment to glance into the bathroom before they crowd each other in Steve’s bedroom doorway. “You keep a score?”

“Sorry it’s so small — What?” Steve looks back at Bucky, finding him terribly close, but keeps his cool. He thinks. He hopes.

“You said you keep a score. Of all the things the river did?” 

“Oh.” Steve shakes his head. “I mean, amnesia is not like it is in the movies.” Steve laughs and shakes his head. “First of all, they don’t even call it amnesia. I have ‘acute memory loss’ due to ‘traumatic brain injury.’ But I know my name and how to read and all that, and I remember a lot of my childhood in Brooklyn. It’s just these summers at the cabin are patchy, and —”

Steve stops himself from admitting his doctors had told him the memories are likely repressed, since the trauma of the car accident happened when they were on their way home from Buchanan. As a child, and an orphan, Steve was forced to suffer through several psychologists and one completely useless therapist, who all wanted to talk to him about PTSD. He gets it. Of course it makes sense: a young kid in a car accident that kills his parents, latent issues about guilt and blame, blah blah blah. He figures it’s just an excuse for why the doctors couldn’t fix his brain. 

“Anyway,” Steve says, when he realizes Bucky is staring quietly, waiting for him to continue. “When I was recovering I started making a lot of lists in my head. I guess it helps me feel like there are lots of things I can remember, even if so much of it is missing.”

Bucky is quiet for a long time, and watches from the doorway as Steve rolls up his sleeping bag and the ruined air mattress to get them out of the way.

“I remember everything,” Bucky admits quietly, like he’s a little ashamed of it. He glances up from under his eyelashes, and Steve stops, looks up at him. “I remember everything that’s happened here.”

“Ugh, I don’t know what’s worse,” Steve says, flashing Bucky a smile to show him he doesn’t have to feel guilty about having such a great memory when Steve’s is in shambles. “At least I forget all the bad stuff too. Like my jerk friend wrecking my parents’ cottage and probably getting us both in trouble.”

Bucky’s eyes go wide, and he bursts out laughing. The quiet tension in the room has already evaporated, and Bucky helps him go through his old drawers, stuff garbage bags full of kids clothes that had sat moldering for ten years, and sweep up. Steve decides to keep the Captain America action figure when Bucky tells him that had been his favorite. They played together as Captain America and Bucky, his kid sidekick. Bucky had been a complete fabrication so that he could be included, since the character never had a kid sidekick (what responsible toy maker would make a kid sidekick for a soldier?) Looking back on it, Steve wonders why of the pair of them he got to be Captain America. Probably because it was his action figure.

After they are finished with the cleaning and brief nostalgia trip, they reward themselves by heading down to the river, sitting side by side on the dock, and eating their sandwiches.

“Steve,” Bucky says, after devouring half the bag of chips. He sucks salt and salsa off his thumb and, before Steve can wish that he could help him with that, leans back, looking up at the sky. “You ever think about getting in that water?”

“What?” Steve laughs. “No way. I came here to fix this place up and rent it out to idiot innertubing college students so that I can stay faaaaaar away, in Brooklyn.” 

“They’re not so bad,” Bucky says, and rolls his eyes to give the kids a break. “They buy a lot of snacks. Luis’s Deli gets tons of business and they are actually pretty good cleaning up their trash.”

“Okay, well...” Steve sighs, and collapses onto his back in order to look at the same sky as Bucky. It seems clear and vast, like the strange empty places he used to go in the summers before his accident. “I’ve planned to return to Brooklyn for the fourth of July and I’ve got a whole cottage full of problems to get through before then. Wasting time splashing around in the river isn’t something I made room for.”

Bucky laughs, rolls onto his side so he could squint suspiciously at Steve. “All those lists and all that planning, and you don’t have time for one little dip? In the middle of summer? At your own riverside cottage?”

Steve winces, and doesn’t answer for just long enough for Bucky to figure it out on his own.

“Oh, no!” He cries, then laughs like Steve knew he would. It isn’t cruel, just cheerful and sweet, gently teasing like Bucky’s laugh always is. “You never learned? After all these years?” 

“Yeah, okay pal,” Steve snorts and Bucky’s chuckles subside when he checks on Steve’s reaction from the corner of his eye, just to make sure he isn’t taking it the wrong way. Such a sweetheart. Steve blinks back up at the sky, and shows his hand. “When you grow up in Brooklyn, and you’re allergic to the chlorine in swimming pools, asthma, eczema, you name it... and the only river is full of rusted cars and probably a dozen fellas named Tony wearing cement shoes —”

“Gross!” 

“— Then swimming isn’t exactly something you pick up. Buck, what are you —”

Bucky moves to his knees, grips the bottom hem of his Power Rangers tee, and lifts it up over his head.

_What the fuck!_

Bucky is on his knees, shirtless. Steve can see the edge of his boxers over the waistband of his jeans. A line of dark hair makes a trail down from his navel, vanishing under the band of soft cotton.

_Fuck!_

_What!_

“Come on!” Bucky says, and his fingers slip open his belt buckle. “Let’s _go_ already!” 

“Go where!” Steve shouts, and he wants to die when he realizes he didn’t ask it to Bucky’s face. He has the perfect amount of hair, dusting the top of his chest and down the muscular plains of his belly. He’s a little pale, but not in a sickly way. Just enough to make his pink nipples stand out on his firm, shapely pecs. Steve shivers and closes his eyes, because he’s pretty sure he’s staring.

Bucky laughs. “Never known you for a guy who plays dumb, pal,” Bucky snorts, and off comes the pants and Steve couldn’t say what Bucky was actually doing to save his life right at that moment. He’s down to his underwear (boxer _briefs,_ it turns out) and climbing down the ladder off the dock.

Oh, right. Swimming? 

He hears the splash of Bucky dropping from the ladder into the cool, swirling river.

Swimming. Fuck.

“Bucky I really don’t know how to swim,” he argues, leaning over the side of the dock. He grips the hard edge of wood with his fingers, suddenly all too aware of the drop off into the water below.

“Well then it’s a good thing I’m the best swimmer in Buchanan,” Bucky says, and maybe it’s true. Bucky doesn’t even look like he’s moving his arms as he glides effortlessly backwards. He draws a delicate fingertip along the wood as he circles the first pylon nearest the ladder, like a partner in a dance. 

Steve swallows, wanting to cut in. “Um,” he manages. “You sure you’re up for this? I don’t want to accidentally drown you or something.”

Bucky laughs again and shakes his head. “Trust me, Stevie. You couldn’t drown me if you tried.” 

_Stevie._

“And you’re not gonna let me just sink or swim, right?” 

Bucky raises his eyes at that suggestion. “No way. That’s not teaching someone to swim, that’s forcing them. You don’t need to pick a fight with the river to learn. I promise, I’ll be with you all the way.” Bucky pushes off the pylon and the water parts around him as he makes his way back to the ladder.

Steve clenches his teeth, makes a halfway strangled sound of desperation before he gives up. “Fine.” Why not? Maybe he could learn to be a bit more impulsive? Besides, the look on Bucky’s face when he agrees, the water glistening on those firm shoulders, his hand wrapped firmly around the lowest ladder rung… 

Steve slips out of his shirt and his jeans, kicks off his boots and his socks, and makes it as far as the first rung of the ladder before he pauses. “Fine,” he repeats, his toes curling around the edge of the wooden bars. “It’s fine. Just fine.” His heart is hammering against the inside of his ribcage and his fists tighten around the sides of the ladder. “Shit.” 

“Steve, just three more steps,” Bucky says softly. “You can practically stand this close to the bank. The current is really weak here, too. You’re not in any danger.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. “Yeah, alright. It’s just, I’m pretty sure this river almost killed me before.” 

“Never,” Bucky growls, so vehemently that Steve finally opens his eyes and looks down. Bucky is just below him in the water, one hand extended up to him. His face is stern, and completely honest, and Steve’s heart fills with something sturdy, like trust.

“Okay,” he says quietly, and takes the next three steps down. His foot reaches for the fourth rung, under the waterline but suddenly there’s nothing there and he’s falling. Steve yelps, scrambles awkwardly against the ladder, and just like that plunges into the river. He sinks like a sack of bricks, but when Steve feels the riverbed under his toes — soft and yielding with a layer of pebbles underneath, he pushes off and breaks the surface of the water immediately with a gasp.

“Whoa!” Bucky cries, and his arms are under Steve’s in a heartbeat. “Look at you, diving right in! I thought we agreed you wouldn’t sink or swim?” 

“I thought you said it was just three steps down!” Steve cries out, but when he opens his eyes finds himself wrapped around Bucky and he startles.

“Three steps,” Bucky says softly, since he knows how to moderate his voice when he’s only inches away from someone. “Not four. It’s okay though, I’ve got you.” 

“Oh, man,” Steve groans and flings himself back at the ladder, grabbing onto something that isn’t quite so… warm. 

“Hey, none of that,” Bucky says. “If you’re gonna learn how to swim you can’t hang onto land. Just give me your hands.” Bucky pushes a little further back and reaches out to Steve. Clint would die laughing, if he found out Steve drowned trying to impress a hot guy by floundering around in a damn river.

“Fine,” Steve groans, because who is he fooling? Drowning trying to impress a hot guy would be the most interesting thing that has happened to Steve in the past decade. He pushes off from the ladder, and gasps when he snatches Bucky’s hands.

“Good! That’s good,” Bucky says, and leans back, kicking his feet just enough to pull Steve a little further away from the dock. The river current runs the opposite direction, so Steve feels the dock pull at his back. It’s reassuring, but also makes him nervous the further away they get. “Okay, do you feel how the top of the river is moving slightly faster? It’s several degrees warmer, too. That’s where your body wants to be right now. The water in your body is trying to meet the warmer water that blankets the darker, cooler river beneath.” 

Bucky’s voice has taken on a slightly dreamy quality, and Steve thinks this must be the strangest swimming lesson he’s ever heard, but… it makes sense. His body straightens out behind him. Lifting his kicking legs up. He really can feel the water getting warmer.

“Good,” Bucky says again, and Steve grins. Bucky’s approval makes his chest tingle. God, he’s such a sucker. “Okay, now kick your feet. No, not like that. You’re not slapping the water with your shins. You’re pumping your legs so that you part the water between them. Like squeezing a trigger, rather than pulling it. Better! Much better.” 

They float out further away from the bank and Steve can feel the current really swirl over his shoulders now, but Bucky doesn’t seem concerned. Instead he keeps his eyes locked on Steve’s, and pushes back with strong, coordinated thrusts of his legs while holding his arms straight out in front of him for Steve to hang onto. “The river is much deeper here. You couldn’t reach the bottom,” he warns. “But it’s also calmer, since you’re away from all the rocks. There’s fish deeper down, where it’s really dark.” 

“Don’t let go!” Steve says, the thought of that endless darkness making his fear tick up a notch. 

“Never,” Bucky says, just as vehemently as he had when Steve claimed the river had tried to attempt murder on him before. “Just remember not to fight it. Now, I’m going to show you how to move your arms…” 

Bucky pushes towards Steve, his face rushing up to meet his, and while he does he moves Steve’s arms in a breast stroke. “You have to cup your hands when you push out, like you’re trying to pet the river to either side,” Bucky explains. “Exactly like that. Keep your legs pumping too. You’re going to slightly sink, but don’t panic. It’s a natural rhythm, like dancing.” 

“I can’t dance either,” Steve laughs.

“You’re hopeless,” Bucky snorts. “Okay, I’m going to let go.” 

Steve doesn’t want him to. He wants Bucky to keep holding both his hands at once, to keep facing him as he swims backwards, to keep pulling himself in and pushing away, just as he described, like a dance. “Okay, ready,” Steve lies. 

Bucky lets Steve’s hands slip away, and Steve dips low, panics for half a second, and then strokes the water in front of him and away. “Aha!” he shouts, taking three more strokes before he tilts slightly sideways and sputters. 

Suddenly, Bucky is there again, and Steve gently rises back into his hands. “You almost got it!” Bucky says. The sun catches big, fat water droplets that pepper his dark hair like jewels. The polished grey stone of his eyes reflect the blue from the water all around them. They’ve drifted fairly far down from the dock again, so Bucky cuts them back towards it, the water cresting up over his shoulders as he swims backwards. Steve is happily pulled along, kicking — no, _pumping —_ his legs to both practice and assist. 

“It’s really not so hard,” Steve admits with a laugh. “I can’t believe I’ve avoided it this long.” 

“I’m happy you did,” Bucky says. “I don’t get to teach people how to swim very often. Usually when people fall in, they rarely get the nerve to come back. Are you ready to try again?” 

They go back and forth like this for what seems like hours. Bucky floating along effortlessly in the water, just out of Steve’s reach. Steve practicing two different strokes, floating, and learning to space out his breathing. When he starts to struggle just to keep his head above water they call it a day. They drag themselves back up the ladder and Steve collapses onto the sun-warmed planks of the dock, arms like boiled spaghetti, and he quickly understands just how tired he really is.

They dry in the sun as it starts to drift lazily back down the other side of noon as they sit in companionable silence for a long time. It’s Bucky that finally breaks it, his voice snapping Steve out of a nap he hadn’t intended to take.

“I’m glad you came back. I think you’ll like it when you remember this place. Even the bad stuff.”

“I didn’t really come here to remember stuff,” Steve admits. The slats of the dock are more comfortable than the warped boards of his bedroom floor, smooth and firm against his aching shoulder blades. He can hear the river running beneath him and he feels a bit like he’s still floating. The constant rush and swirl of unconcerned water loosens the knot of anxiety that has been starting to tighten in Steve’s gut. Maybe he should get an innertube after all. He’ll definitely have to come back now, to visit Bucky and swim in the river. How cold does it get in Buchanan in the off season? Steve shakes his head, reminding himself that’s besides the point. “I came here because the insurance company won’t renew if the cottage is condemned. I could lose it if that happens. I didn’t come here for therapy.”

Who cares if his therapist had suggested it.

“Oh,” Bucky says, and even though Steve isn’t looking at him, he can tell he’s staring, like he always does. He’s pretty sure Bucky still can’t believe Steve is back or an adult or as big as he is. It doesn’t make Steve uncomfortable, which is strange because it always makes Steve uncomfortable when people visibly notice his body. Instead, Bucky’s curiosity feels normal, almost expected, like there’s some leftover familiarity from when they were kids and he’s just getting used to Steve’s new shape. It could just be that Steve likes how much effort Bucky puts into trying to figure him out, those cool gray eyes working their way over him when Bucky thinks Steve isn’t looking. “You had to know that you’d be remembering stuff anyway. I think saying that you just came here for the insurance is an excuse.”

“Hey,” Steve breathes out, rising up on his elbows. “Are you calling me a liar?”

“Yes,” Bucky says, and he’s smiling and Steve isn’t sure how to feel. Bucky is pushing one of Steve’s biggest, reddest buttons and no amount of cuteness should let him get away with it. “I think you’re lying to yourself, anyway,” he continues, and raises up on his elbows to match Steve’s pose, unconcerned by Steve’s deepening scowl. “Did you find your sketchbook? I didn’t see it under the bed.”

“Yes, and no you can’t see it.” Steve snaps. Bucky raises an eyebrow at Steve’s sharpened tone, then pulls himself up. They are mostly dry by now, and Bucky gathers up his clothes while Steve watches, helpless. 

“I already know what’s in it,” Bucky says. His tone is a little on edge, but not hostile. “Do you?” 


	5. Rescue

Bucky leaves right after what Steve now thinks had been their first fight. Maybe they bickered like this when they had been kids; Steve doesn’t know, but he _hates_ it. He finishes loading up his truck for another junkyard run before calling it a night, takes an icy cold shower and cocoons himself into his sleeping bag. Before he can fall asleep, he spends hours on his phone, catching up on all the videos and memes Clint dug up from the depths of social media that day. It’s a good distraction, but as soon as the bright little screen goes dark for the night he’s reminded of the way Bucky left; not quite upset, but not smiling either, like Steve’s grown used to.

On top of that, he’s moved into his parents’ bedroom, which feels weird even if he doesn’t remember them in it, and the new air mattress that Pietro dropped off smells like offgassing plastic.

Steve winds up tossing and turning for hours. Finally he gives up, kicks himself like a caterpillar out of the sleeping bag, stomps into the kitchen and grabs the stupid sketchbook.

“Stupid Bucky and his shit,” Steve whispers. “Throwing rocks. Calling me a... liar.” Steve trails off when he sees the first sketch. It’s simple, grass between rocks, bent in the wind towards water, which lazily ripples away from its reach. It’s the sort of thing a twelve year old might draw but it’s... not bad. “Huh.”

The pages are stiff and crinkled, some sticking together before he can break them apart and spread open more scenes of the river. No cottage, no parents, nothing but the waterline, and the dock, and the stones, and a study of water skeeters, sticks, birds… “Huh,” he says again, shocked he could have possibly had this much patience when he was so young. One entire page is filled with nothing but an agonizingly detailed ripple of water. “Huh…”

Page after page of detailed sketches, some in color pencil, some in raw graphite, a couple of charcoal gestures, one particularly lonely scene of the dock painted in watercolor (Steve hadn't found any water colors in his art box so that one really is a mystery.) It is more peaceful than he expects, and he’s just about to put it away and head to bed when he finds a perfect pencil drawing of a young boy with an easy smile, a dimple in his chin, and long brown hair. “Bucky,” he reads the little pencil caption at the bottom of the page out loud.

Another weird thing about his brain damage? His handwriting changed drastically after the accident. It had been one of those unexpected side effects that took forever for him to figure out on his own, since the doctors didn’t seem to care that a thirteen year old’s handwriting was different than a twelve year old’s. Ever since then, he finds it challenging to write anything other than straight, block lettering. It's efficient and legible but not particularly artful. _‘Bucky’_ is written here in a twelve-year-old’s cursive, with a huge loop in the tail of the y.

The flashback hits him so hard his left knee buckles, striking the cabinet door hard enough that the sound startles him away from it. Steve sucks in great gulps of air, finds his sketchbook in the sink when he finally catches his breath. With shaking fingers he plucks it out, opens it back up to the last drawing. “Holy shit.”

> _The dock is small and sturdy, freshly sealed against the rain and smelling a bit like sap. It’s still a little sticky but Steve doesn’t mind. He’s sitting there like he has every day since his parents dragged him out to the cottage, trying to take advantage of being far away from home. There aren’t things like this in Brooklyn, where you would never see so many rocks and trees and plants and birds and no people. The river doesn’t screech and play stupid games like the kids his age, or shove him and make fun of him like the bigger boys on the schoolyard. The river is strong and impervious to his constant summer colds (and ear infections and pinkeye and strep throat and itchy chicken pox) so he doesn’t have to worry about making it sick, either._
> 
> _Besides, he can tell the river all about his favorite books and museums and maybe a little bit of baseball without it getting bored. Soon he starts telling it about his day, and soon after that he starts imagining the responses. Sometimes he doesn’t bother sketching anything, and just chats with the river as it chats back, skips stones across the surface which it skips back…_
> 
> _Things changed when some older kids — teenagers for sure — floated down the river in kayaks. They were screaming and whooping all the way down, disturbing the whole town of Buchanan with their obnoxious cries. When they drifted down past Steve’s little dock they all threw their beer cans in the river at once._
> 
> _Steve had none of it._
> 
> _They had none of his having none of it._
> 
> _That’s how Steve fell (was pushed) into the river. They weren’t trying to kill him. Everyone in Buchanan can swim, since everyone in Buchanan lives near the river. Of course Steve only lives in Buchanan in the summer and with his asthma and his allergies to chlorine, never spent much time in pools. He goes under the water like a sack of bricks. The kids panic, and paddle away._
> 
> _They don’t panic because they are afraid they just killed someone. They panic because the river itself lifts up like a great arm, a glistening length of clear water, and deposits a soaked, coughing Steve on his little dock._
> 
> _“Are you okay?” Bucky says._
> 
> _“Yes!” Steve insists, yanking his arm out of Bucky’s grip. He’s grateful, he really is. His heart’s still racing and his breath’s still short and he’s still so damn scared, so he takes a moment to realize how rude he’s been to his best friend. “Thanks, Bucky.”_
> 
> _“Sorry your sketchbook got wet,” Bucky says, and the sketchbook rides a few gentle fingers of water, all the way up from where Steve had gone over._
> 
> _“S’okay,” Steve says, only to shiver, cough, and shiver again not a second later._
> 
> _“You’ve never gone swimming before. Now I can see why.” Bucky’s eyes glitter with mischief and Steve guffaws with laughter. Unfortunately, that combines with his panic and triggers an asthma attack that has Steve turning blue in the face after a few short struggling breaths. Then Bucky puts his cold hands against Steve’s back, and Steve’s lungs open back up. He gasps, pulling in fresh, clean air all at once, and instantly starts to relax. “Sorry pal,” Bucky says as Steve’s chest opens up and up and up. “You didn’t ask but I figure I owe you one now. Not everyone will go to war over me for a few beer cans.”_

Steve blinks, and just like that the memory is snugly returned, like it had never left. Of course, like some of his memories this one is a little wrong. Firstly, he can’t quite remember everything he said to the teenagers in the kayaks. What exactly had they been so pissed about that they paddled up to his dock, clambered up the little ladder, and chucked his skinny frame into the river? Secondly, the river couldn’t just spit him out on the dock, because that’s not how rivers work. If he changes only a few things, he can imagine Bucky — who is definitely a strong swimmer — had actually shown up at just the right time to fish him out of the water.

“Ah,” Steve says, and relaxes. No wonder he and Bucky had been best friends, despite Bucky being a little vain and kind of a jerk. He saved his life. Steve wonders if his parents had known about it, or if he had kept Bucky to himself.

He goes back to bed, hoping that Bucky will be there tomorrow on the little dock, showing up just in time for breakfast like always.

The next morning Steve wakes up, takes a very brisk shower, shaves with cold water, gathers up his usual breakfast, and heads down to the dock. Since Bucky had cleared the trail a few days ago the walk down is slightly less perilous than before, and he doesn’t have to worry too much about how full his arms are as he makes his way down to the water. He eats his breakfast as slowly as usual, sitting cross legged next to a shiny, glittering wet stone that he’s used to seeing on the plank beside him. He doesn’t think too hard about it, intentionally keeping the noise in his head down as he tries to listen to the water, the slight rustle in the trees, the birds in the distance and the bugs all around. It’s peaceful and pretty but today he can feel his loneliness stretch out before him as he waits.

“I’m sorry, okay,” he sighs, plants his chin in one hand and picks up the stone with the other. It’s slippery and wet, like this stone always seems to be, and he wonders if he should take it with him and let it dry out in the sun on his porch. Wouldn’t be much of an apology, he figures, though he’s not sure why it would matter.

“S’okay.” Steve startles around at the sound of Bucky’s voice. Today Bucky is wearing a NASA t-shirt, navy blue in a weathered screenprint across the front, and black jeans that are artfully faded into a soft, dark gray. He steps down the dock and sits down, letting his legs drop over the side into a boyish kick over the water. He picks up the second power bar sitting between them without asking, opens it and tucks his dark hair back behind his ear before he takes a small nibble.

“I remembered stuff from before,” Steve says, and Bucky pauses briefly before taking another bite, letting Steve continue without interrupting. “I remembered coming here every day, I remembered talking to myself a lot,” Steve grins in a self deprecating way. “I remember being a lonely kid. Getting into fights. I remember some teenagers in kayaks tossing me into the river. You saved my life.”

Bucky’s eyebrow raise and he glances over, almost like he’s suspicious of Steve’s story. “I remember,” he says with a touch of caution in his tone. “You almost drowned.”

“Good thing you got there just in time,” Steve says, and adjusts himself so that he can dangle his legs over the side of the pier next to Bucky’s. When he glances at Bucky he catches him looking a bit sad, grey eyes clouding over and a tiny frown, but then he looks up and the two smile at each other. Steve shrugs away from the burning in his cheeks and huffs out a laugh. “Good thing you’re the best swimmer in Buchanan. Did we tell my parents what happened?”

“No,” Bucky says. He’s still smiling at Steve, which does nothing for the whole burning face situation. “But you introduced me to them after that. We got to play more often together, instead of just chat.”

“Oh,” Steve says. Weird to think that they hadn’t played together before that, given their age. Then again, Steve had never been a kid that played a lot, outside of word games and puzzles. He had been sick so often he wasn’t even allowed to play with a lot of the other kids his age half the time. It’s nice that he seemed to have grown out of his asthma after that. “How many summers did we spend together?”

“Well. I was always here. And so were you, in the summer. But together as friends? Just the one,” Bucky explains a bit haltingly, like he has to carefully chose his words. “But it was a great one. You called me your best friend. You turned twelve that summer.”

“I wish I could remember my birthday party. Did you come? Did my dad barbeque? Did my mom call you adorable? I feel like my mom would have called you adorable.” Oh no, what is he doing? Is he flirting? Why on earth does he think he can get away with it? Though maybe, why not...?

Bucky laughs, bright and happy, and it startles Steve enough for him to turn and forget about his blushing face giving all his secrets away. Bucky grins back at him, arrogant as always. “Yeah, I was there. I was always there. All those fireworks every year. And for the record, _everyone_ thinks I’m adorable.” Bucky’s laughter stops short when he gets a look at Steve’s face. “You’re all red. Sunburn?”

“Jeez.” Steve drops back down and slings his arm over his face. “Yeah or something. So much work. Outside. I’m going to paint today,” he quickly adds, in awkward attempt at deflection.

Steve can feel Bucky watching him carefully, which is awful since he can’t seem to form complete sentences and he knows he’s a full body blusher. Even his arms must be red by now.

Bucky’s easy smile quickly returns. “I’ll help you if you come swimming with me again.”

“You’d help me anyway,” Steve says with a laugh.

“Yeah,” Bucky answers simply, caught.

Steve laughs, a real actual laugh that makes his belly jump. Soon Bucky joins in, and his laughter is so cute and unselfconscious and Steve is in love.

Fuck. Steve is _in love_ with Bucky.

 _Fuck,_ Steve thinks again. He’s _always_ been in love with Bucky.


	6. Brooklyn Comes Knockin’

Steve and Bucky spend the morning after breakfast carefully taping off power outlets and switches. It’s easy, because all the switch plates are removed, but when they have to tape along the edge of the ceiling it gets really fucking hard, because Steve only has the one step stool and after a single hour of taping the seam between the wall and the ceiling his big strong arms feel like useless overcooked noodles.

“It’s all that swimming,” Steve complains, after he dramatically collapses on the floor. “Score one more point to the river.”

“You call that swimming?” Bucky snarks. Unlike Steve, he is still going strong, teetering on the top step of the stool to reach. His arms are stretched over his head in order to lay the bright blue tape flat, the roll shoved high up his forearm as he maneuvers around the corner, into the hall. It’s a heck of a view. “I’ve seen dead fish swim better’n you.”

“You know what, pal? I think —” Steve’s snark is rudely cut off when his phone bleeps out a cheerful tune, vibrating across the floor until it snags on a broken board. “Shit,” he hisses, and slaps at his phone to turn it off but accidentally answers the call. “Shit!”

“Steve! Hey buddy, you’re alive!” The tinny echo of Clint’s voice comes out, barely audible on the phone’s earpiece. Steve groans and manages to fold his nearly useless arm at the elbow, dropping the phone to his ear.

“Clint, just tell me it’s not on fire,” Steve says, and pushes his fingers into his eyes. “Or, on second thought...”

Bucky turns sharply around to give him a very curious and very judgemental look, and Steve waves at him to let him know he was just joking. _Mostly_ joking, anyway.

“Uh,” Clint starts. “I mean, almost? The fire alarm went off at three in the morning last night. Er. This morning. False alarm, but it’s the third this month. I think Charlie is still smoking in that back stairwell that goes to the basement.”

“Shit,” Steve sighs. “Sorry man. Did they fine the building again?”

“Again?” Clint repeats. “This happened before?”

“Yeah, sure. After three false alarms they usually issue a fine to the property. I keep telling Charlie he can’t smoke there but, you know, I think he’s actually got special needs. I can’t exactly kick the guy out for that.”

“I can’t believe I’m the one telling you this, but yes! Yes, you can!”

“Clint, the guy is disabled. I’m not kicking him out.”

“Ah well, there’s that self-sacrificing idiot I know and love,” Clint chuckles. “That boyfriend of yours figure that out yet?”

Steve sits up immediately, fumbling with his phone, and Bucky laughs, right before yanking a fresh strip of tape from the roll. “He’s not!” Steve hisses. “He’s also helping me tape off the living room.”

“I heard that,” Bucky practically sings, and looks Steve straight in the eye as he tears off a length of tape with his teeth. _Yeowza_.

“Sounds like a guy who can handle your shit,” Clint snorts. Steve drops his hot face into his palm. How the fuck good can these people hear anyway? “Put me on speakerphone, I want to tell this guy what a good job he’s doing.”

“No. Shut up. How much was the fine?”

“Thought you told him to shut up,” Bucky innocently checks.

“He’s got you there,” Clint admits, equally as innocent. “Come on, don’t be rude! Introduce us!”

“Two against one is hardly fair,” Steve mumbles, but he drops his phone back onto the floorboards and taps the speaker icon. “Clint-Bucky, Bucky-Clint.”

“Good to hear Steve didn’t just make you up to get us to leave him alone,” Clint cries out gleefully and Steve already regrets his decision when he watches Bucky stiffen. “We worry about our poor, single friend, out there all alone.”

Clint is literally the worst wingman. _Ever._

Bucky laughs, but some of the energy has gone out of him. “And here I was worried about the life he’s been living without me. What kind of man doesn’t know how to swim?”

“Well, that’s our Steve. Allergic to the beach or fun or something, I forget,” Clint adds nonchalantly. “Sounds like he’s in good hands there.”

Bucky smirks and folds his arms across his chest, the blue tape still around his wrist like a bracelet, then laughs when Steve makes sure to give him his best withering stare. “Hands that know how to swim,” Bucky laughs. “At least.”

“I believe in you!” Clint shouts. “By the way — _um_ — the light fixture in unit four wasn’t shorted out,” Clint adds quickly. “It was infested with cockroaches.”

“What!” Steve shouts, leaping up to his feet. “Are you _kidding?_ Clint why wouldn’t you lead with that!”

“I’unno,” Clint carelessly answers. “Didn’t want to freak you out. I should probably go deal with that. Oh and it was five hundred bucks for the fire department fine. Plus a hundred bucks for pizza. I treated the tenants since they were all pretty pissed to get dragged out of bed at three in the morning. Hope that’s okay.”

Steve swipes a hand down his face, dragging down on his eyes and then his mouth and eventually his whole face. “Shit. Thanks Clint. Um. Send me the bill for the exterminator.”

“Oh don’t worry,” Clint says. “You’ve got a tab. Nice meeting you Bucky!”

“You too!” Bucky says over his shoulder, slapping down the last of the line they were taping off. Steve ends the call and Bucky steps down the ladder, then sits on his knees boyishly next to Steve. He hands him the nearly-empty roll of blue tape with a triumphant grin. “He seems nice. What’s next?”

Steve’s stomach practically squeals like a pig. Bucky chuckles at Steve’s indignant scowl at himself, then his own tummy gives an answering gurgle and he laughs harder. Steve’s planned crankiness over Bucky and Clint ganging up on him immediately deflates. He is such a sucker for Bucky’s goddamn good humor. He wishes he could pull Bucky down on top of him, and he sighs in defeat. “Lunch,” Steve declares. “I need a break.”

As usual Bucky stays behind when Steve makes a run into town. He stops at the junkyard, tosses out several more bags of garbage (so much garbage for such a small cottage!) then makes a drop at the thrift shop. There were a few pieces of furniture in good enough shape for someone in Buchanan to use for their summer retreats. He double checks his waterheater order at Lehnsherr’s (any day now, Erik promises him) and confirms that his new flooring and windows will be delivered by the end of the following week. He picks up an extra set of rollers and brushes since he knows he won’t be painting alone, and heads back home with his truck smelling of fresh sandwiches from Luis’s Deli.

According to his mental list, he still has at least three more weeks worth of work, even though he’s ahead of schedule with all the help Bucky’s offered up. The floors will be the last thing that go in and then it’s back to Brooklyn.

Suddenly it sinks in, and Steve curses out loud. “Shit. Back to Brooklyn...”

Bucky springs off the porch when Steve makes his way back home from where he’s parked. He breathes in the grassy scent of the path, smiles at his friend, and tries to find peace despite his return trip to Brooklyn looming over his shoulders. Luckily, Bucky is too excited about Luis’s latest sandwich concoction to notice that Steve’s shoulders are stiff from the weight of it, and helps him unload his latest round of supplies (well, mostly helps by carrying the sandwiches down to the dock, but at least he replaces the ice in the cooler and grabs a beer for Steve too.)

Steve catches up to him and they toast to a house well-taped, since they haven’t even cracked open the paint buckets yet.

“You don’t get views like this in Brooklyn,” Steve says, trying not to sound too mournful as he looks out across the water to the other bank. Luis’s spicy chicken sandwich is pleasantly burning its way through his stomach, but he doesn’t mind. Bucky is sitting next to him, closer to the edge of the dock, and following his gaze out across the width of the river. “I wonder if there are deer around here.”

“Tons,” Bucky answers brightly, always excited to give Steve lessons about the river. He finishes sucking the barbeque sauce off his thumb and scrunches up the white wrapper from his own sub. “They’re just shy of people but they all come down to drink.”

“Never seen deer in Brooklyn either,” Steve grumbles. Steve thinks of Clint, one of the few friends he has outside of his own tenants, and shrugs. “But I guess there are good things about the city.”

“Really?” Bucky says, and raises a skeptical eyebrow. “People come here to get away from cities like Brooklyn. Always sighing and filling their eyes up with as much nature as possible before they are forced to go back. Like you are, right now.”

Steve covers for how close Bucky got by rudely blowing out a huge puff of air. “Well, we don’t have much of a choice, Buck. All the work’s in the city.” He jams his sandwich wrapper back into the brown paper bag from the deli.

“That’s stupid. Why don’t people just work out here?”

“No, _that’s_ stupid. If everyone worked out here they’d wreck it. Just like Brooklyn.”

Bucky heaves a defeated sigh, and looks straight down where the water is dark, making tight whorls around the pylons that support the dock. For once he looks something a little bit less than happy, and kicks his feet over the edge. “I guess you have to go back at the end of summer.”

“Just a couple more weeks actually,” Steve says. Bucky looks back up sharply and Steve feels it in his chest. He hadn’t wanted to have this conversation so soon. “Maybe you should get a cellphone so I can text you, you jerk.”

Bucky clicks his tongue and folds his arms across the Nasa logo. “I hate cell phones. Everyone always taking pictures like that’s the experience they come here for.”

“Aw, it’s not the phone’s fault that it’s a camera,” Steve teases. “You could at least give me your e-mail address?”

“Let’s go paint,” Bucky says, standing suddenly.

So they go paint.

It takes hours just to do the hallway, and they make it halfway through Steve’s old room before they lose the light. Bucky leaves when Steve drives into town to get dinner, like he always does, so Steve eats alone while coordinating a visit from the exterminator with Clint over the phone.

Despite being the world’s worst wingman, Clint actually does a good job looking after tenants. He has his own apartment building in Bed Stuy, and knows the best contractors in the city who are willing to help with repairs that aren’t exactly up to code with city building ordinances. It’s a good thing too, because on top of the misfiring alarm system, there’s also a broken call box, a rat sighting on the top floor fire escape, and the cooker on the roof that ran out of propane and none of the tenants wanted to replace it themselves.

Also, everyone is accusing the blind man in Unit 1 of stealing their mail, but no one wants to confront him about it so apparently they’ll wait for Steve to get back. So really, it’s more or less the usual.

“So,” Clint says, his tone shifting immediately after the building updates come to an end. “Bucky, huh? Is this someone I can tell Natasha about, or...?”

“Good _night,_ Clint,” Steve emphatically says, refusing to fill in that blank. Luckily, Clint cuts him some slack and they end the call without him having to awkwardly explain his mysterious new/old friend. Steve winds up grinning and holding his phone to his chest, and not for the first time thinks he really should take a photo of Bucky. Would that be weird? Maybe a little, since Bucky made that comment about how much he hates people taking pictures with their phones.

The next morning Steve meets Bucky at the dock for breakfast and their routine starts all over again. They tape, they paint, they chat about nothing in particular. A few memories sneak back in between the two of them, and Bucky happily tells Steve about his own parents. Steve tries to forget about going back to Brooklyn, reminds himself that it’s still weeks away, enjoys the simple company, and the work.

Clint calls a few more times — the cockroaches had luckily been contained but the rats were another matter, the fire department seems happy for now, and the no smoking signs Clint put up near the smoke detectors in the stairwell seem to be deterring Charlie. He manages to sneak a few greetings in to Bucky who miraculously emerges in the living room every time Steve steps aside to take his calls. The way Bucky laughs when Clint conspires to tease Steve over speakerphone grows on him, just like everything about Bucky, so Steve isn’t even a little bit mad about the camaraderie they discover by torturing him.

Steve survives his crush by telling himself that he’s attracted to Bucky, but doesn’t love him. He’s gorgeous, like a supermodel, but ultimately a stranger. Steve doesn’t even know where Bucky lives, or his last name. It’s not possible to fall in love with someone based off a handful of superficial points of mutual interest and physical attraction, it’s just _not._ He’ll just ignore the way that laughter makes him feel, the way those swimming lessons makes his heart race, the way this undeniable trust grows and grows between them.

Steve may be swept along by his feelings, but he’s still in control. He may not be able to deny them, but he can certainly ignore them, and every time he catches Bucky giving him admiring looks or turning a little pink around the edges he reminds himself that Brooklyn is still waiting for him. It’s not even just Brooklyn. Something about Bucky just feels so impermanent, like any moment he could slip through Steve’s fingers and be gone. It’s terrifying, really, and Steve finds strength in that fear to keep his distance.

The days vanish off the calendar one by one, in the easy way that summer days always seem to slip by, heedless of any attempt to draw them out.

During their lunches on the dock Bucky tells Steve more and more about the town of Buchanan, about the family of beavers that just finished a new creek about two miles up, and the efforts the town is making to save the old bridge about one mile up. He tells Steve about the First Nation tribe that lived there, already long gone before the colonials came through and gave the town and the river new names. The natives had fished in the water just as noiselessly and cautiously as deer, always worried about disturbing the river god.

“River god,” Steve repeats, and looks back down at the water, scrunching up his nose. “Creepy.”

“You think so?” Bucky says, and sounds a little nervous. Steve looks up and finds him still smiling, but Bucky always smiles and Steve’s starting to realize he’s just good at covering when he’s uncomfortable.

Oh _no,_ Steve realizes suddenly. He’s _such_ an asshole. Bucky grew up here, probably believes in some of that himself. Sarah Rogers would have used Steve’s full name in that deep shout of hers if she had known he had disrespected someone else’s faith.

_Steven Grant Rogers!_

Yeah, just like that.

“Well,” Steve backtracks. “I mean, people talk a lot to themselves in peaceful places when they think no one’s around. Powerful guy, flowing around with everyone’s dirty secrets.”

Bucky bursts out laughing and knocks his shoulder playfully into Steve’s. “Sometimes I wonder if you have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“The answer is usually no, and you know it.”

Steve tells Bucky about Mars. He watches Bucky’s gray eyes grow wide with wonder as he talks about NASA’s theories of underground rivers, hiding from the CO2 rich atmosphere. Bucky is impressed by all the things Steve knows about the space program, even though Steve figures it’s basic stuff. He spends a lot of time alone in the evenings and there are so many documentaries on Netflix. Still, Steve revels in Bucky’s admiration, proud that someone could be so interested in all the random details he’s picked up, and he figures it’s worth it when he uses up all his data that month to watch the latest Science Channel special about Pluto.

“So it’s not a planet?” Bucky asks. The sun is coming back down, though they have already been dry for hours after Steve’s last swimming lesson.

“Point of contention.” Steve shrugs then digs his phone out of the pile of his clothes to load up some of the pictures he saved the previous night. They are both sprawled on the baking planks of the dock, Steve happily exhausted and still cool from the swim. “The way scientists define planets change over time,” he explains. “So Pluto just got outclassed I guess? But some people like to hold onto the distinction. Maybe for sentimentality or tradition.”

Bucky nods from flat on his back. “Names are important. Pluto is still a planet if that’s what people call it.”

Steve laughs. “Pluto is still Pluto. It has a heart too, if you want to see.” He hands his phone over to show him a snapshot from NASA, and Bucky shouts with joy and takes it in both hands. Then Bucky adjusts to see the screen at a better angle, resting his head in Steve’s lap. Steve’s own heart shoots off towards the stars in a rocketship, leaving him behind.

“Amazing! To see something so far away. Look at that...” Bucky stares at the picture for a long time, and Steve stares down at Bucky, enjoying his wonder. “Did an ocean make that shape?”

“There’s a theory that it’s an impact crater from an asteroid,” Steve explains, and Bucky makes a small sound of disappointment. He’s still interested, but not all that impressed. “They think there’s a subsurface ocean beneath it. It’s all frozen of course. The sun doesn’t get out that far.”

Bucky looks past Steve’s phone suddenly, eyes full of surprise, then back at the phone. “Amazing.”

Not for the first time, Steve wishes he could kiss him. He bites his own lip, as hard as he can, and reminds himself he’s going back to Brooklyn.

“Summer _break!”_ a voice cracks through his train of thought and Bucky startles out of Steve’s lap. A group of young people, probably sixteen years old, come around the bend of the river. Their innertubes are loosely tied to one another, and when they catch sight of Steve and Bucky they all raise their energy drinks over their heads and crow. Girls and boys both laugh and cheer, happy to be enjoying such a lazy morning in their brightly colored swimsuits and Steve laughs. He’s pretty sure if he came across this rowdy group a month ago, when he first arrived, he would have been immeasurably irritated by their noise and the water they kick up as they drift.

Bucky catches his eye and nods towards them. “Looks like fun, right?”

Steve snorts. “Looks like a sunburn.”

Bucky calls bullshit with a raise of his eyebrow alone, then peels his shirt off over his head. One of the teenagers catcalls him, and Steve hides his face in his hand. Bucky dives off the very end of the pier, with almost no splash at all, because apparently he’s a show off. Steve rolls his eyes and hauls himself up, heading back to the ladder. It was the deal he had made with Bucky after all, for his help.

Eventually, they get all the rooms painted; a nice pale blue in the bedrooms and sage green in the bathroom. The ceilings and the kitchen get a fresh coat of creamy white. Steve installs the electric water heater while Bucky looks on suspiciously over his shoulder. Steve replaces the light fixtures while Bucky holds the rickety step stool. They both clamber onto the roof with the patch kit.

The flooring arrives, so they tear up the old warped boards while Steve plays music on his iPhone. The new flooring is click-together, so it’s relatively easy to cut to length and slide into place. Bucky likes using the rubber mallet to whack them flat and tight into their little grooved edges, so Steve does placement while Bucky sets them.

They get a good assembly line going and before they know it, the cottage is nearly finished. All that’s left are the windows, which would arrive any day. Steve decides to order furniture, blinds, and all new fixtures, pushing his return trip to Brooklyn out even further. Clint could hold down the fort just a little bit longer.


	7. Independence

It turns out that Steve’s birthday week heralds a heat wave throughout the county. He orders two air conditioners as soon as his weather app warns him, but it’s too late. By the fourth of July and the third morning of hundred and fifteen degree heat (ninety percent humidity!) Steve collapses as soon as he collects Bucky from the dock in the morning.

It’s too disgusting to work. It’s even more disgusting that Bucky doesn’t seem to be affected by it at all.

“I can clean out the chimney,” Bucky helpfully suggests, fresh and cheerful and not even a little bit sweaty. _What the fuck._

“I was just going to close it off,” Steve says, dismissing the idea from where he lies spread out on the floor, arms and legs extended in his best impression of a starfish. “I ordered baseboard heaters from Lehnsherr’s for the winter. Fireplaces are hazards, and now they have those restricted burn days.” He shrugs, trying not to feel too guilty from losing some of his mother’s favorite cozy feature, but pleasing his own nostalgia is not what he’s here for. “Insurance will probably be less, anyway.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, stumped. “Well, what about the overhead crawl space? We should check to see if the insulation was ruined by the rain water damage.”

Steve laughs. “Where do you get all this energy from? It’s too hot. We’re not gonna work today.”

Bucky shrugs. “I just want to take advantage of the time we have left.”

Steve’s chest heats in just the right way at that, and he resists the urge to drop a cheesy line about how they could just make out. “We don’t have to work just to spend time together. We could just hang out. Like normal friends.”

“Well,” Bucky starts, with a roll of his eyes. “It’s not like we can exactly _play_ together anymore.” Steve gulps at his phrasing, and suddenly the heat growing in his chest is on the wrong side of uncomfortable. Bucky doesn’t notice, because he’s preoccupied with staring at his own fingers. “Do you still draw?”

“No,” Steve says, and looks back up at the ceiling. The spiderwebs are long gone, cleared out with a swiffer on an extending aluminum pole, and it’s amazing how much brighter the place looks already. “I didn’t even remember drawing at all until I found my sketchbook.” That’s not entirely true. Steve had always doodled. Sketched in the margins of his school work, drawing wherever he could put pen to paper. He grew up spending more time with books than he had with people; the brain damage didn’t exactly cure his introverted nature. Recess in the computer lab, PE class with a book and a doctor’s note, straight to Mrs. Wilson’s house after school to do homework and read some more. She asked him once if he wanted to take an art class and he seriously considered it until something painful tugged him away from it.

In hindsight, he’s maybe a little resentful that everyone told him he was creative and imaginative and ‘so good at math’ and no one bothered to tell him he used to be an actual artist.

“Hey,” Bucky says pulling him out of his funk. “Where’d you go?”

“Sorry.” Steve didn’t realize he’s been quiet for so long. It’s so fucking hot everything feels sluggish, even his ability to make conversation. “Never thought I’d wind up regretting something I didn’t even remember til a couple weeks ago.”

Bucky plunks down next to him, rubs his chin then pushes his hair back. If Steve didn’t know any better, he’d think Bucky was nervous. “Okay, well, I wanted to give it to you at lunch but. Got you a birthday present.” Bucky digs in his shorts pocket with a lopsided grin, not quite as confident as usual.

“Aw,” Steve’s heart does a funny little thing and he laughs. “You really didn’t have to.”

Bucky drops a box of sparklers between them, the old fashioned kind in a dusty patriotic box with big block letters. “Course I had to. I’m your best friend, aren’t I?” He says this ironically, with the most arrogant grin he could manage, using the childish phrase just to tease him. Still, Steve notices that Bucky’s cheeks has gone a little pink, and he’s not looking up from the sparklers.

“I haven’t used these in years,” Steve says, turning the box over in his hands. According to the ink-heavy print, it’s an eight piece set of ten inch gold sparklers, and the safety warning printed in huge, blurry letters on the back advises against using without adult supervision. “Where’d you even find these? Thought they were illegal in the whole state.”

“Went out of the state,” Bucky says with a shrug then gives him a conspiratory wink. “Got more of em too, down at the dock.”

“Alright, pyro.” Steve laughs and Bucky leaps to his feet, apparently ready to get out of the house. “Let’s go swimming before you burn the place down.”

“Damn,” Bucky huffs out a small laugh, and offers Steve a surprisingly cool helping hand off the floor. “I can’t even begin to explain how ironic it’d be for me to start a forest fire.”

Steve feels like he walks out of a sauna and into a blazing fucking _furnace._ The moisture immediately licks him all over, like he had to push through a giant, sloppy cow tongue in order to get through his front door. Sweat prickles his armpits, the small of his back, and the line that runs down the center of his chest. “Ugh,” he complains. “Hot.”

“The river is nice and cool,” Bucky reassures Steve over his shoulder, as he leads the way around the woodpile, through the trees, and down towards the dock. “If we’re skipping work we should get right back to your lessons.”

“Sounds like you’re just using any excuse these days to —” Steve stops short when he finds two towels spread out on the dock, and a metal bucket full of bright colored rockets. There’s a chocolate cake, with candles, sitting on top of an ice chest Steve doesn't recognize. “What’s this?”

“Happy birthday!” Bucky cheers, trotting down the short path ahead of him. He steps onto the dock and sweeps up the bucket of fireworks. “We can shoot them out over the river! No one will notice because of the parade in town. I bet you never. Um. I mean.” Bucky loses steam as he takes in Steve’s stunned silence. “It’s okay, right?”

“Aw,” Steve coughs, then forces his sweaty hands into his pockets. “It’s so sweet of you. I just. I don’t know what to say.”

“Say you’ll come swimming with me?” Bucky says, his face lighting up with hope.

Of course Steve goes swimming.

According to Bucky he’s been getting better, but Steve still feels like he’d drown without Bucky there, coaxing him through the water. It’s also a hell of a workout. Steve’s only hobby back in Brooklyn is to basically live at the gym, but the river makes him work harder than any personal trainer he’s ever had. It’s refreshing to feel physically challenged by the water around him, now that he isn’t quite so scared of it anymore.

The water glides over him like a second skin, presses his swim trunks flat against his thighs and making his hair stand on end when he dips below the surface. It’s exhausting in the best sort of way, and eventually Bucky trusts him enough to let him go for a short distance. Steve rolls onto his back, letting the river buoy him up from behind, and when he catches Bucky watching him he’s surprised to find his friend red in the face, eyes heavily lidded and lips slightly parted as he stares.

“You okay?” Steve calls over to him, and starts to make his way back. Bucky shakes his head and swallows, hard enough for Steve to notice.

“Yeah, sure. You look good. I mean, you’re swimming good.” Bucky clears his throat. “I mean, you don’t look like you’re trying to imitate a drowning buffalo anymore, so.”

Steve shouts with indignity, and flaps his hand just over the surface of the water to splash Bucky right in his smug face. “Not such a dead fish now, huh?”

“You do _not_ want to get into a water fight with _me,_ mortal,” Bucky cries out, shielding his face with one hand and laughing.

“Oh, I dare you! Mister Best Swimmer in Buchanan,” Steve says, raising out of the water then clapping his hands together in what he thinks is a huge tidal wave of water.

He had no idea.

“Alright,” Bucky laughs. “You asked for it!” He brushes the very top of the water and Steve yelps when the entire river practically heaves in front of him. He ducks, like that does any good, then gets sucked under by the strength of its tidal pull. Being sent down so suddenly into that darkness disorients him, and he flounders for a moment before he feels a light pressure under his arms and breaks the surface of the water, sputtering.

“Gah, you win!” Steve concedes, laughing until he realizes he’s in Bucky’s arms. It’s not quite the same as when he had fallen off the ladder in their first lesson. Something about how Bucky’s hands drift gently down Steve’s sides, about the solid platform his shoulders make for Steve’s arms, feels so much _closer,_ light years beyond that initial awkward moment.

“Captain America’s kid sidekick Bucky, to the rescue again,” Bucky says softly. His grey eyes have turned a pretty shade of green, reflecting the river’s gemstone color, and pearls of water stick to the tips of the long fringe of hair hanging down to his jaw. “I. Um.” Bucky swallows again, this time hard enough for Steve to hear the bones in his throat click. “I didn’t think it’d be like this.”

“Like what?” Steve asks, not sure what he means. He’s still barely treading water, instead leaning mostly on Bucky. At this distance they nearly brush their bare chests together, and Steve holds his breath.

“Just. Being adults,” Bucky says, struggling to rationalize what he’s feeling. “It’s different. Isn’t it?”

Steve wants to kiss him so bad he feels it like a physical ache. Instead he slowly lets out his breath, while watching Bucky’s mouth. “Lots of things are different from when we were kids, Buck. Some of ‘em aren’t even half bad.” His voice raises the last thing he says into the realm of being a question; a subtle request.

Bucky pulls back, leaving a cold void against Steve’s chest. “Yeah,” he says, and he’s smiling again, floating easily away from Steve’s suggestion. “Yeah, I guess so. Let’s dry off.”

So they dry off.

The cake isn't huge but it’s buttery and rich. Between the two of them they manage to eat nearly all of it, then Steve groans with regret and an ice-cold Coke in his hand.

They spend the day alternating between the darkness of the cottage and the relief of the river, stopping only to eat lunch and watch a few Youtube videos about Saturn’s moons.

When the blazing inferno of the sun finally sets, they take up their seats at the end of the dock and light the sparklers. Bucky drops his head on Steve’s bare shoulder, and he can feel his mouth smiling against his skin. They don’t talk about anything, just watch the shower of sparks fall into the dusk darkened river. When the parade in town starts they can hear the deep thunder of the official fireworks show, so Steve plants the narrow stems of the rockets in his empty Coke bottle and aims carefully out over the water. Bucky cries out in glee at the sight, bright splashes of red, white and blue fall like rain into the blackened streak of the river.

“I’ve always watched the fireworks in town,” Bucky admits, after the last sparks fade and the smoky air goes still. It’s even more quiet than usual, the crickets and the frogs and mosquitos driven into silence from their racket. “Never really saw them this close. Happy birthday,” Bucky adds, voice growing heavy with drowsiness. “I hope this makes up for all the ones I missed.”

“By a long shot,” Steve declares, and uses Bucky’s lighter to light the very last sparkler to life. “This is the best damn birthday I ever had.”

Bucky is close now, pressed against Steve’s side, head nestled comfortably on his shoulder. Steve takes a chance and drapes one arm around Bucky’s shoulder, pulling him in even closer, giving him something like a sideways hug. “Even better than the ones before the accident?”

Steve snorts, and gives a dismissive wave with his sputtering sparkler. “Oh, who remembers.”

* * *

 

**[Steve & Bucky enjoying an evening together papercraft by [@milollita](https://milollita.tumblr.com/)]** 


	8. Avoidable Truth

The first flat boxes of furniture (some assembly required) arrive a week after Steve’s birthday. The delivery guys are happy enough just to find the place after maneuvering their oversized truck off the unmarked gravel road all morning. They’re not so happy to carry the dozens of packages up the steps, so they leave them all leaning against the porch lattice and both take off as soon as Steve signs the paperwork.

“Is that all your cheap Swedish crap?” Bucky asks. Steve can’t blame him, he had referred to his recent purchases as exactly that when he picked them out online. Bucky watches Steve from the porch, leaning his elbows against the rail. He has a half eaten apple in one hand, and licks the juice off the long fingers of the other. He’d been helping Steve clean that morning, then conveniently took off just before the delivery truck showed up. He certainly won’t get out of helping Steve carry everything inside, that’s for sure.

“Yup,” Steve admits, doing a good job not watching Bucky stick two fingers in his mouth at once and suck. “Sans meatballs. Give me a hand?”

Bucky rests his apple on the rail, careful enough to save for later, then helps Steve carry in all the boxes. They start with the living room (because _holy shit_ that futon weighs enough as a bag of cement!) and get the futon frame, coffee table and a media stand built. They accomplish this feat in complete defiance of the instructions, which are simple enough for toddlers to follow until Bucky reads one arrow wrong and it goes downhill from there. They wind up pelting each other with little pegs intended to hold up the shelves, then give up panting and exhausted on the new living room rug.

“Will you stay for dinner?” Steve suddenly asks, and doesn’t dare roll over to see what Bucky’s reaction might look like from where he’s sprawled out on the floor next to him. So far the closest Bucky’s come to staying late was on Steve’s birthday, when they lit bottle rockets out over the river and ate themselves sick off chocolate cake. “We can watch space documentaries on my iPad.”

He listens to Bucky shift without turning to meet his eyes when he props himself up on one elbow to watch Steve’s reaction. “Um,” he starts, but gets stuck already and Steve flicks his eyes up at him. Bucky is looking out of the window, trying to figure out the time of day. The cottage is so much brighter since they put in the new ones, with their crystal clear glass, and trimmed back all the trees. “I can come back. In an hour? Is that okay?”

Steve doesn’t mean to sound so annoyed, but the accusation slips out anyway. “Where do you even go?”

Bucky’s eyebrows leap up at his tone, but really he has no right to look so shocked. Steve’s felt this conversation nudging on the periphery of their easy days, especially as the anxiety of leaving gains more ground in his gut and Bucky’s mysterious life continues to elude him.

“I go home,” Bucky says, like Steve should have known better.

Steve clicks his tongue. That answer isn’t good enough. “You won’t tell me where you live, you won’t give me a phone number, or email address. Sometimes I think you don’t actually want me —” Steve’s sucks in a breath and his face heats and he realizes what he’s about to say. What he’s about to admit.

Bucky watches him with those huge, gray eyes, red lingering on his cheeks from their earlier laughter. There’s a nervous edge to his look, like he’s holding something back. “You know where I live…”

“Yeah, fine,” Steve dismisses, rolling his eyes. “Let me guess, I came over a lot when I was twelve? And you’re hoping I’ll just fucking remember one of these days.”

“Steve,” Bucky says his name quietly, trying to soothe him, but you know what? It’s not going to work this time.

“I don’t think you really realize how hard it is to play this game with you. You come here every day, and we hang out, and it’s _awesome_ but then you don’t tell me anything about yourself and you leave every night, like you’re going to get into some kind of trouble if you spend the evening here.”

“I tell you about myself,” Bucky insists, and he’s confused, shaking his head to deny what Steve’s saying, but Steve’s not finished, not by a long shot.

“Do you have a job you just won’t tell me about? A night shift or something? Do you live with your parents and they expect you home for dinner?” The accusations come out so fast Steve can barely keep track of what he’s asking, but when the next one slips out he knows he’s gone too far. “Do you have a wife?”

“What?” Bucky twists his face, the very idea of that last one utterly perplexing him. “No! Of course not. That’s not even possible. Steve why does it even matter what I —”

“It matters because I have to _leave,_ Buck!” Steve is shouting now, right at the ceiling. “I have to go! Back to Brooklyn! As soon as this shit is finished. And I have no idea how to get ahold of you or even who the fuck you really are! So yes, it matters!”

Bucky is stunned into a long silence, and Steve doesn’t know what else to say. He finally turns to look at him, and finds Bucky’s knees drawn up under his chin, arms wrapped around the front of his shins. His expression is hard but not emotional, like he’s tackling a math problem in his head. “How long is the drive to New York?”

“What?” Why the fuck does he want to know about driving all of a sudden? Bucky never goes with Steve into town, never shown any indication that he even has a car. “It took me close to eight hours to get here.”

“Shit.” Bucky hisses, like he’s never even bothered to look up how far Brooklyn is from Buchanan, Virginia. Like the thought has never crossed his mind just how far away from bumfuck nowhere Steve actually lives. “That’s a long drive.”

“Yeah. It is. So you can see why I’m so —”

Bucky lunges forward and kisses Steve on the mouth. A soft cry breaks out of Steve’s chest, but Bucky nips at his lips to startle them open and swallows it whole. Bucky slips his arms around Steve’s neck and his tongue into his mouth and Steve lets himself be toppled onto his back, taking Bucky down with him.

Steve’s anger is snuffed out immediately, replaced by something much closer to fear. He’d felt this way once before, hadn’t he? He can’t actually remember, just feels it’s true, like the sensation of dragging an extra sharp pencil over the smooth paper in a sketchbook, without any actual memories of sitting down with one. He knows it. Not actual anger towards Bucky but a very real feeling that he’d lose him. This time around that fear mixed with all his anxiety over leaving into something that makes his blood run cold. He’ll drive away from that cottage, get in an accident, and his memories of this incredible person would evaporate, all over again.

Now, he has Bucky in his arms and oh, how _stupid_ has he been? There is no way he could forget this. There is no way he could lose this again.

Steve had thought Bucky’s juicy mouth would be warm, but it’s not. Bucky’s tongue is cool as it slides against his own, licking deeper and deeper down, and Steve practically drinks him; a refreshing glass of water. He moans as Bucky slips down on top of him, and somehow manages to grab ahold of Bucky’s narrow waist under his t-shirt with numb and shaking fingers. Bucky shivers, startled by the skin-on-skin contact and his back arches, a small sound of surprise escapes into Steve’s mouth. Steve’s hips rise at the intense friction, grinding their pelvises together and Bucky’s sound turns into a whimper. _Delicious._

“Steve,” he pants, breaking off the kiss so that he can breathe into Steve’s neck. _Even his breath is cool_ , Steve thinks. A puff of refreshing air on a hot summer evening. Bucky struggles slightly away, then changes his mind, pressing small kisses behind Steve’s ear before he speaks again. “I have to go.”

“No, you don’t,” Steve says, just as a suggestion, and his hands slip all the way down to grab Bucky’s bottom through his jeans. Bucky moans and his hips roll into the touch.

“Steve,” Bucky insists, trying but failing to resist the urge to grind his own erection into Steve’s. He whimpers at his own thwarted efforts and finally manages to bare down and hold still. “This isn’t right. I can’t do this.”

That makes Steve pause. He brings his hands back up, rests them on Bucky’s hips, and Bucky sits back on Steve’s lap. Bucky is bracketing Steve’s hips with his knees, face flushed and lips moist with spit and red as ever. It’s so erotic that it takes Steve a moment to recover before he searches Bucky’s face in an effort to understand. “What do you mean? Isn’t right? Is it… a religion thing?”

“Sort of,” Bucky admits, and looks down at his own hands, twisted up in Steve’s shirt, knuckles pressing into the tight pack of muscle across Steve’s stomach. “I just… I need an hour. I’ll be back though.”

Steve bites his lower lip and he scrunches his whole face up. If they weren’t going to have sex then he definitely needs about an hour too.

“Unf,” he huffs out. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you gotta do.” He drops his hands off Bucky’s hips, lets them fall to the floor in a defeated thwack. “I’m just gonna take a cold shower, if it’s okay by you.”

“Does that help?” Bucky chuckles as he dismounts Steve’s hips, smiling despite their spectacular failure. He stretches when he stands, leaving Steve to wallow on the floor alone.

“Sometimes,” Steve groans, making no move to get up.

“And you were so proud of that water heater.”

“That water heater is a damn fine investment,” Steve insists, pointing an authoritative finger at his friend to declare that’s that. Bucky just laughs, and gives him a sympathetic smile, so Steve gives up and just shakes his head. “Well. At least the stupid river can’t come up here and snuff out the pilot light this way.”

Bucky freezes mid-stretch, and blinks a few times. “Is that dangerous?”

“Of course,” Steve says. It’s easier to focus on Bucky’s question, odd as it is, than his own body, or the little sliver of skin that peeks out from under the hem of Bucky’s Game Boy t-shirt. “Pilot light goes out and the gas keeps flowing, fills up the little shed it’s in. One little spark and it explodes like a bomb. No more cottage. Good thing my foster mom had a contractor come out here and shut it all off after it flooded.”

Bucky drops his arms, sighs up at the freshly painting ceiling with a small, defeated smile. “Yeah, good thing. One hour Stevie,” he says, reminding him of the promise. “I’ll be back.”

The door swings shut behind him and Steve hears Bucky’s boots trot down the porch stairs, and finally Steve sits up with a groan, sore and aching.

“Stevie,” Steve repeats, and his face hurts from smiling so much. “Names are important...”

He goes ahead and takes that cold shower — and boy is it _cold_ after so much glorious heat the last few weeks — then gets anxious and starts fumbling with the boxes to the new bed for the larger bedroom. Somewhere along the line, with all the furniture moved out and the fresh paint, he had stopped thinking of it as his parents’ bedroom.

Once the bed is built he’d actually have a proper place to sleep. Of course, once the bed is built, he’ll have precious little left to do and he tries to push Brooklyn out of his mind after that thought. It’s getting harder to do. His fix-it list from Clint on the apartment building is getting longer by the day, and he’s already had to forward thousands of dollars to his poor friend to cover the contract work for immediate repairs. It’s impossible to keep splitting his time between the two locations. He’s going to have to go back sooner or later.

“Later,” Steve growls, and tears open the first box to his new Brusali bed frame.

He’s not sure how long it takes him to build it — much longer than if Bucky had been there to help wrangle all the screws, which fly _everywhere_ after Steve tears open the plastic pouch — but he’s sweaty and exhausted by the time he finishes and it’s well past dark. At least his obnoxious boner has finally settled down.

Steve wanders into the kitchen and sees the time: nearly seven o’clock.

It’s been three hours since Bucky left, and Steve is starving. _So much for only one hour,_ he thinks, but he’s not worried. He figures Bucky got stuck having dinner at home so he eats without him, then catches up with Clint about the disaster with their trash chute. It turns out the fire marshal is finally going to inspect the security system since it’s been sending out so many false alarms, and Clint’s just learned that he’s going to do an inspection of the entire property.

Of course, the security system isn’t actually the problem; that’s just an issue of Steve’s tenants smoking too close to the sensors. What keeps Steve up for hours that night, after he sets up his air mattress on his new queen sized bed frame, is that he finally agreed to come home before Tuesday. If the fire marshal does a full inspection, Steve will need to be there for damage control, unless he wants the city to slap a fine on him for whatever the hell it was he thinks he did to fix that boiler the previous year.

It’s already Thursday, so Steve has Friday and the weekend — Monday too if he wants to push it— and he still has no idea what the hell he’s going to do about Bucky. That thought makes his patience fizzle out, and suddenly he’s frustrated as hell that Bucky stood him up. Family or religion or whatever, it’s still rude.

Steve finally falls asleep watching something on the history of the Hubble telescope, alternating between missing Bucky and reminding himself that he’s mad at him.

Steve sleeps in later than he means to, and wakes up painfully slow. He clicks his tongue, disappointed in himself when he sees his phone battery is at 1%, and plugs in before he finally crawls out from under his new bedding. He leaves his phone on a stack of folded up cardboard he’s using as a nightstand then lets his frustration from last night steam away in an extra long, hot shower. Whatever his reasons, Bucky wouldn’t have stood Steve up just to be an asshole, and they’ll have enough to talk about now that Steve knows he’ll be leaving soon.

Steve tries to push Brooklyn out of his head, but it’s impossible now that he knows his actual return date. How did it get here so fast? It feels like only a week or so again that he arrived in Buchanan, dreading this summer project. It’s hardly fair that he finally had Bucky in his arms only the day before and he’s already summoned away; his worst fear coming dangerously close to true.

He gathers up his usual breakfast and heads to the dock, kicking stones along the path the whole way there.

The river looks unusually sluggish this morning, the surface glassy and smooth, like a mirror is pressed down on top of it. Steve finishes his apple, sets the core next to the second one he brought for Bucky and waits.

He picks up the polished, damp stone, tosses it back and forth between his hands, sets it back down again. And waits.

He sighs in frustration, lays back and gazes up at the sky, the tops of the trees, and the birds darting between them. And waits.

“Where are you?” Steve says, when he realizes he’s never had to wait so long for Bucky to show up.

“Sorry,” Bucky says, and Steve startles, like he always does despite how much he thinks he’s used to Bucky’s silent approach.

“It’s okay,” Steve blurts out, and scrambles to stand, because somehow he thinks Bucky won’t be sitting down next to him this morning. “What’s going on?” He’s wearing his Captain America t-shirt again, the one he wore when they first met, and somehow the sight of it makes Steve’s heart plummet to his feet, an elevator with the cables cut.

“I didn’t come back last night because I was scared,” Bucky admits, and shuffles his feet, completing the whole, guilty picture. Steve wants to let him know it’s hardly the first time a hot date has stood him up but somehow he can’t muster that brand of levity. He’s too scared himself about what happens next. Bucky swallows before he continues. “I want to go with you, to New York. But I don’t know if you’ll want me, once we get there.”

Steve has his arms wrapped around Bucky in less than a heartbeat, and Bucky shoves his face into the crook of Steve’s neck. “I don’t know how I lost you in the first place,” Steve tells him, finally making something like a confession about his fears. “But I swear it won’t happen again.”

“You don’t really get it though,” Bucky says softly into Steve’s shoulder. “And I can’t force you to understand. I’m part of this place. It’ll change me if I leave. Maybe you won’t like me so much when I’m there.”

Steve shakes his head then pulls back, so that he can look Bucky in the eyes when he says this. “You’re right. I don’t understand everything about you. But what I understand I love.”

Oops. Well, fuck it. He already knows he loves Bucky, Bucky may as well know too.

Bucky is quiet for a long time, staring at the midpoint between them. “This is going to go so badly for us,” he whispers.

Steve snorts rudely, and holds Bucky’s chin up. Steve’s surprised that Bucky is shorter than him. “Have a little faith,” he says. It doesn’t bother him that Bucky hasn’t said it back. Steve is just grateful Bucky didn’t run, and allows him to hold him this close. “We’ll figure something out. Together.”

Steve takes the initiative, kisses Bucky gently, like he’s an animal that may be startled away by his advances; a deer coming down to the riverbank for a sip of water. It’s different than the desperate, convincing moment in the cottage living room. Bucky melts against Steve’s mouth, his cool moist lips parting easily and their bodies gently slot against each other perfectly, like some well worn habit. Steve cups Bucky’s jaw with both hands, absorbing the sensation of Bucky’s muscles moving beneath his fingers, the curve of the bone where it meets his ears, the cleft in his chin, exploring the new surface of a planet that had seemed so impossibly far away a day ago.

They break for a moment, breathing in each other’s air. Steve has tears in his eyes when he says, “Come with me to Brooklyn.”

“Sure,” Bucky says, as easy going as ever.


	9. Unavoidable Truth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for this chapter: mention of a homophobic slur in the third paragraph.

Things quickly return to normal after that, though with all kinds of kissing and cautious, charged touching. It’s great. Frustrating, but great. Even better than the kissing and the touching and the panting and the heat, is that now they have an actual plan that drives off all of Steve’s fears of leaving Bucky behind. Steve tells him about the fire marshall, about the inspection and his completely rational assumption of what will happen when they discover his improvised work on the building’s broiler. Bucky surprises him by immediately suggesting the return trip. He’s tense and quiet when he says so, but there is no mistaking his commitment. “I’ll be ready,” he says. “I’ll survive it.”

They would drive back to Brooklyn on Monday morning, together. Steve would deal with the fire marshall on Tuesday. They’d figure out the rest of their lives from there. All that’s left is this one, final weekend in Buchanan.

They finish building the rest of the furniture before lunch, and move on to a few small projects like cleaning all the mess from their bigger projects, stashing the extra flooring under the house, and replacing all the cabinet hardware in the kitchen and the bathroom. Steve gets Bucky laughing again in no time, unintentionally of course, when he tries to pronounce the Swedish names of his new drawer handles. How exactly is one supposed to pronounce FÅGLAVIK, asshole? Not like you’re trying to start up a fucking _bigoted lawnmower,_ according to Bucky.

Just as Steve is gathering the energy to drive into town to pick up lunch, a delivery van arrives with his new appliances and the real mattresses, so instead of taking their usual break the work continues. They shove the new refrigerator into place and test the oven, the stove, the garbage disposal. “It all works,” Steve says, still impressed by brand new appliances, rather than what he manages to hold together with chewing gum and toothpicks. What a concept that a brand new garbage disposal works better than the refabs he gets from the consignment appliance mat.

Bucky bitterly argues that nothing good comes from places that end in “-mat” and Steve declares he’s not allowed to come with him to New York anymore.

Steve celebrates by emptying out his cooler, stashing his remaining Starbucks frapps in the new, appropriately frigid refrigerator. He pulls out his remaining two beers, some leftover bean dip and half a bag of tortilla chips for them to eat right there at the kitchen counter. He is too hungry to get into the truck right away, and isn’t ready to drive away from Bucky to pick up lunches. Bucky accepts the beer with a nod of thanks and stuffs his face with a few chips before taking a swig.

“Do you need a place to stay in Brooklyn?” Steve says, unprompted. The question of where Bucky is going live in New York has been gnawing at him, because he doesn’t want to assume that Bucky is just going to move in with him. Not that he’d mind. Or does he? That would be moving awfully fast, the logical side of his brain points out to him. “I own an apartment building.”

“Yes, I know,” Bucky laughs. “You’re on the phone with Clint so often I feel like we have a third roommate. That place sounds like a dump.”

Steve winces. “Well, it’s… yeah it’s a dump,” he concedes. “I do what I can but those old buildings require so much work. It’s how I learned how to do most of this stuff.” Steve motions around himself to include the cottage, and at the same time really takes in how much work he’s accomplished. The place is clean, still smells of fresh paint, and the floors are so shiny Steve can see his reflection in the finish if he looked close enough. The furniture is new but casual, appropriate for a summer retreat and sturdy enough to stand up to rowdy frat boys. It’s a goddamn masterpiece. He doesn’t think he could have done it without Bucky. Well, or his nearly empty savings account. Yet another reason he’ll have to get back to Brooklyn. He’s been in Buchanan for two whole months, and needs to remind his tenants to pay the rent. Steve suddenly brightens when he remembers number fourteen. “I do have an empty one bedroom. It needs a little — well, _a lot_ of work. It’s basically condemned. But we could fix it up together! I could —”

“Steve, Steve,” Bucky laughs, raising his hands to slow Steve down. “I’ve got a place already. I’m staying with some — well, a cousin I guess. Family.”

“Oh,” Steve says, a little disappointed. He guesses he’ll be fixing up number fourteen by himself. Boring, but at least it avoids the awkward situation of Bucky being one of his tenants.

“Um,” Bucky shifts his weight, lets the rim of the beer bottle hover just in front of his lips. “So how close to the East River is your place?”

“Well, it’s Brooklyn,” Steve shrugs, trying not to watch Bucky tease the bottle like that. “Everywhere is pretty close. My place is on South 8th street, just a couple blocks away. Probably a five minute walk?” Steve reconsiders and quickly amends it. “Ten if you get mugged.”

“Okay,” Bucky nods, absorbing that detail. Steve isn’t sure if he should tell Bucky he’s joking or not. It’s not the best neighborhood and he has a feeling Bucky hasn’t spent much time outside of Buchanan. Of course, he did say he’s staying with family so who knows, maybe Bucky has been to New York before.

“So your cousin,” Steve says, changing the subject. Bucky glances up from over the edge of his beer. “Got a name?”

“Tony,” Bucky answers, smiling like a little shit around the rim of his bottle when he finally takes another swig.

“You’re such a jerk,” Steve says, but his tone is fond, and he doesn’t push any further.

Steve now knows a whole two facts about his best friend. Bucky lives in Buchanan, Virginia and has what he “guesses” is a cousin in New York, named Tony. Steve watches Bucky wash down his salty meal with a swig of beer and has to admit that’s not everything he knows. Bucky loves outer space. Loves the theories of different bodies of water, on faraway planets no humans have ever stepped foot on. Loves salami but hates buffalo chicken. Loves fireworks but hates crowds. Bucky is sarcastic, always smiling, and shy. He’s a little naive, and celibate, but he has odd streaks of wisdom and a quiet charm that makes him seem older than he really is.

Bucky also loves his hometown, which he’s willing to leave behind in order to stay with Steve.

Steve leans over the counter and kisses Bucky, tasting his beer and the lingering salt of the chips. Bucky hums into it, and puts his beer down on the counter with a hard thunk to keep up. Steve hooks a finger into Bucky’s belt loop and drags him over, putting the other under Bucky’s chin because he just can’t get enough of feeling Bucky’s jaw work beneath it. Their hips collide hard enough for them both to make a surprised little _oomf,_ and laugh into each other’s mouths.

Other than his belt loop maneuver, Steve’s hand stays above Bucky’s waist, since he doesn't want to push Bucky’s boundaries on sex. Steve doesn’t mind. He’s going to get to kiss his best friend every day, which will be worth all the cold showers and aching, lonely nights under his sheets.

They stand like that for a long time, mouths innocently exploring mouths, hands tracing the outline of shoulders and backs and one, shivering expedition across Steve’s belly. He’s not embarrassed by his erection, at least not anymore. Bucky and his damn beer bottle had already been enough to get him going, and Bucky doesn’t seem to mind.

Finally, Bucky is the one to come up for air, pulls his hips away and sighs, breaking it off like he always does when he’s had enough. So far he’s managed to wait until they are both on the very edge of control, when the heat between them threatens to engulf them, and Steve can tell it’s a constant test for Bucky’s discipline.

Steve doubts he’d have the integrity to keep Bucky on track with his religion or whatever keeps him celibate, if Bucky just let himself go one day. He’d try. He’d _really_ try. It must mean a lot to Bucky, even if he never talks about it. Steve is happy to settle for kissing, especially when it hardly feels like settling. But if Bucky just reached down…

Steve coughs and moves out of Bucky’s arms. “I should go get some sandwiches before Luis closes up,” he says, knowing better than to invite Bucky along. “Want to try the new Cubano? He swears it’s ‘the shit’.”

“What?” Bucky’s face is red and his eyes are slightly glazed, like he just woke up from a nap and he’s still trying to figure out what to do with his hands. “Yeah. Cubano sounds great.” He settles for hooking his thumbs into his pockets, and leans back against the counter just enough to awkwardly knock into his beer with his elbow.

Steve laughs. At least he manages to turn Bucky on, as much as Bucky lights him up. Misery loves company.

They eat lunch on the dock, wave at the cluster of innertubers who make one last lazy trip down the James River before summer slips away completely. It’s Friday afternoon. Neither of them mention that this is their last weekend in Buchanan, but the thought is ever present in Steve’s mind, like it’s written in the wake of the trailer teenagers’ inflatable rafts.

“What’s your favorite thing about Brooklyn?” Bucky asks suddenly, after a long period of silence between them. He’s sitting up on the dock next to where Steve is flat on his back, both with their legs hanging off the edge.

“Hm?” Steve says, sluggishly rolling over. He’s a little drowsy after such a big sandwich and the late summer heat. “Well, I guess how close it is to everything. There’s all these museums and parks, tons of restaurants and shops, and people. Tons of people from everywhere. It’s kind of a mess, but like — it’s still so easy to just run into someone you know on the street.”

“So your favorite thing about Brooklyn is the people?” Bucky reasons, working something out behind his clouded-over eyes. “I guess you don’t get a whole lot of folks down here.”

“It’s what makes Buchanan so charming,” Steve says, and reaches over to cover Bucky’s hand with his own. Bucky draws it away and tucks it under his arm. “Hey, what’s the matter? Having second thoughts?”

“No,” Bucky sighs. “No. I know what I want. Just. Maybe nervous.”

“We can come back,” Steve reassures him. “Mom and dad used to come back here every summer.”

“Until they didn’t,” Bucky grimly reminds him, then suddenly looks down. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to sound that way. I just. I remember when you were suddenly gone one day. You didn’t even say goodbye. I came up here looking for you. I guess I was pretty upset actually.”

Steve watches Bucky in silence after that. He’s never seen Bucky upset before, not really. He supposes it’ll happen eventually, as their relationship turns into something more. Bucky catches him staring and smiles at him and Steve’s heart does a happy little dance. He lunges up, circles Bucky’s shoulders with his arms and then drags Bucky down on top of him, kissing his face as he shouts in surprised laughter.

Then Bucky moans, his hips grinding into Steve’s and oh, this was a terrible idea. Steve licks into Bucky’s eager mouth, Bucky moans again, and this time Steve’s hips answer Bucky’s thrust with a weak suggestion of his own. Then Bucky curls his fists into Steve’s shirt and tugs him over, so that Steve winds up covering him. He takes the hint and runs his hand under Bucky’s Street Fighter t-shirt, spreading out his fingers across Bucky’s flat stomach, like he knows he likes. Bucky’s fists tighten in Steve’s shirt and he feels the cotton pull.

“Fuck,” Steve huffs, shakes his head and plants it on Bucky’s shoulder. “We should. Go for a swim or something. Cool off.”

Bucky’s panting with tiny little groans on each breath and finally unhooks his fingers from Steve’s shirt. “Right,” he finally agrees, his face twisted with pain despite his smile. “Never thought you’d be the one to suggest a swim first,” he laughs. “But sure.”

Steve has just started wearing his swim trunks in the morning so all he has to do is peel out of his own stretched out shirt. Bucky drops his own tee on top of Steve’s and Steve can’t help but notice the stiff line of his erection, trapped under his own trunks. Steve carefully steps down the ladder like he always does, and Bucky dives off the end of the dock. He comes up quickly with a huge, relieved gasp, and tosses his head to throw his long hair back. Bucky’s body is sleek and beautiful when it’s wet, and now Steve can see Bucky’s own full body blush standing out on his pale skin. Steve pushes off the dock’s support pylons into the main flow, carefully letting the surface current do most of the work for him, like Bucky had taught.

“I’m going to miss this the most,” Steve breathes out, and treads water just in front of Bucky. “But at least I learned how to swim.”

Bucky laughs. “Well, I sort of cheated a few times,” he confesses. “You definitely would have drowned if you were out here by yourself.”

Steve laughs, splashes just enough water at Bucky to get him in the face without starting another war, then flings himself back when Bucky splashes him back. “Ouch!” He shouts, when his head knocks into the dock pylon behind him. That thing was way closer than he thought.

“Aw,” Bucky gasps, closes the space between them and takes Steve’s head in both his hands, pulling him in close. “You okay?”

“Yeah fine,” Steve says, and all that heat he thought the cool river had dissipated comes rushing back when his face is pressed so near Bucky’s bare chest. “That thing just came up outta nowhere.”

Bucky kisses the top of his head before he relaxes back down in the water, and just like that the stinging pain is gone. “Better?”

Steve blinks, and is suddenly reminded of the first time they met, when Bucky had thrown that stone at him. “Yeah,” he says, when Bucky’s eyes meet his. “Yeah, Buck. Feels nice.”

Bucky swallows, not moving away. His fingers curl into the hair at the base of Steve’s skull when he quietly says, “I thought you said cold water helps.” He was trying to tease Steve with the accusation but his breath hitches, and the river current brings them closer together in a full body press.

“I said sometimes,” Steve reminds him with a grin. “And you usually gotta be alone.”

“I don’t want to be alone anymore,” Bucky says, almost pouting. Steve finds it to be a sad confession, since it means Bucky doesn’t live with family after all. “Steve. When we go to Brooklyn I want —” Bucky stops suddenly, and his head snaps around, drawn to something further down the river.

“What is it?”

“Those innertubers,” Bucky says, entirely distracted now from their tender moment. “They’re going to get into trouble. Too drunk to swim properly.”

Steve doesn’t say anything at first, because while he reasons that it’s silly to worry about them he also can read the stiff line of Bucky’s back, and his tense frown. Bucky _never_ frowns. “Okay. We can get out. Should I call someone?”

“Not yet,” Bucky says, and pulls away from Steve, lunging forward into the river.

“Whoa, Buck! What are you doing?”

“Um,” Bucky says, and shrugs as if that were an answer, and before Steve can shout his name, dives forward and vanishes into the water.

“Bucky?” Steve blinks hard, because Bucky doesn’t just dive under and swim. He vanishes completely, folded into a great, heaving wave that rose up to take him, and not Steve, away from the dock. It looked like the river just swallowed him whole. “Bucky!”

Steve can’t help it. His mental tally adds a long, grating hash mark on the scoreboard for things the river has taken from him, and now he screams, “Buck!” Steve shoves off from the support pylon, immediately floundering in the water as he desperately swims downriver, following Bucky’s path. If this fucking river is going to take one more thing from him —

“I’m fine!” Steve stops short when he hears Bucky’s distant call, sees a head bob up from the water about fifty yards down river. There’s no fucking way he could have gotten that far, that fast. “Don’t worry about me!”

Steve treads water back and forth, just as scared of plunging ahead into the main current as he is to trust Bucky’s word, and let him go alone. He has no delusions of catching up to Bucky with his meager doggy paddle skills. Bucky really is an amazing swimmer, when he isn’t slowly dragging Steve through the water, so maybe he just knows how to take advantage of the river’s strong current to get so far, so fast. Steve should really just trust him. “Be careful!” He cries out.

One long, pale arm waves at him just before he vanishes around the bend, and now Steve has no choice. He has to trust that Bucky knows what he’s doing. What _is_ Bucky doing? There’d be no way to catch up with those innertubers —

> _“Steve! Sarah said you can’t go into the river,” Bucky argues. “That’s the rules!”_
> 
> _“Buck-y,” Steve whines, extending the ‘y’ at the end like he usually does when he’s trying to convince his best friend of something he knows he’s not supposed to do. “I’m not going into the river. I’m going to get to those rocks. We can make it the beaches of Normandy. Captain America is going to use his shield to help the soldiers get off the landing crafts.”_
> 
> _Steve uses the ivy to climb partway down to the rocks that line the riverbank, though his skinny arms struggle to hang on to both the thick plants and his toy. The pockets on his baggy shorts are already bulging with toy soldiers, Captain America’s teammates, and his arch nemesis the Red Skull. It’s very important that Steve doesn’t try to cram the Captain himself into one of those pockets._
> 
> _“Rivers don’t have beaches,” Bucky snarks. “We have banks.”_
> 
> _Steve snorts. “You have imaginations though, don’t you? Come on, if we do this right, Captain America can defeat the Nazis and save **everyone**.” _
> 
> _“You can’t save everyone,” Bucky says, rolling his eyes, but he follows Steve anyway, because he always does._
> 
> _“Captain America can save everyone,” Steve shoots back. “Captain America can do all sorts of things people can’t —” A patch of dead ivy crumbles in his hands and he slips, skids, and finally tumbles down to the rocks._
> 
> _“Steve!”_
> 
> _It hurts, and it hurts everywhere, but Steve is miraculously not terribly injured. He spits out some of the ivy that managed to find its way into his mouth and he stumbles one more time before sitting up on the rocks. Bucky lands next to him, huge grey eyes wide with fright._
> 
> _“‘m okay,” Steve mumbles, mostly feeling the sting in his pride rather than his freshly skinned knee. Bucky blows out a sigh, smiles, then looks around._
> 
> _“Where is Captain America?”_
> 
> _“Oh no!” Steve scrambles around the rocks, pats his shorts pockets, and tosses aside some of the ivy that landed next to him in a tangled clump. Then he looks at the river. “Guess he fell in.”_
> 
> _Bucky frowns, drops to his hands and knees to look into the shallow edges of the water where it meets the steep bank._
> 
> _“He went deep,” Bucky sighs. “You’ll never reach him.”_
> 
> _“Can’t you just bring him up?” Steve asks, panic rising._
> 
> _“I can’t,” Bucky says. “He’s made of plastic. Doesn’t have any water in him.”_
> 
> _Steve wants to cry, but he won’t._
> 
> _His dad got him that figure the previous summer for his birthday. He had figured it was just some stupid Independence Day accessory that came with their decorations, a condolence gift for making him spend his summer vacations so far away from home. Then it turned out Captain America had a cartoon show and comic books, stories of World War II history and science fiction, and Steve was instantly hooked. He had never played with action figures before, always too busy reading or working on his puzzles, drawing or carefully sorting his father’s massive collection of baseball cards. Sure, he has all the Howling Commandos by now, and a few weird vehicles and other accessories, but Captain America was the only one that mattered._
> 
> _“He was a dumb toy anyway,” Steve grumbles. “Not like one guy could have made a difference in a war.”_
> 
> _“Well,” Bucky says, planting his fists on his hips. “Looks like Cap’s kid sidekick Bucky needs to rescue him. **Again**.” _
> 
> _Then Bucky stomps right off the rocks into the water, except it splits around him, like someone is parting the water with a giant, invisible snowplow._
> 
> _“Wow!” Steve shouts, as the water peels further and further away from the bank. The silty ground squelches under his sneakers as he follows the trail that Bucky makes for him. He has to be careful when the ground — such as it is — suddenly drops into a low dip since dead and rotting branches lace the shifting surface, but he also laughs. The walls of water beside him are smooth like glass, swirling with sediment lifted from the bottom of the river as Bucky forces himself back and away from the well worn bed. “Wow!” He says again, when a dark, glossy shape curls away from him and he realizes he just saw a huge river fish. “Bucky, you’re amazing!”_
> 
> _“I know,” Bucky snorts. “Look, there he is. Can you see him?”_
> 
> _Steve clambers down a particularly gnarly snarl of soggy branches, and finds the brightly colored plastic figure hooked onto a more recently sunken limb. “Got him!” Steve gusts out, and lifts the figure over his head in victory. Then he sees all the other junk piled up in the same crook of fallen trees. Glass bottles, tin cans, and a clutch of random plastic, tangled like a nest in glimmering fishing line. “Gosh, people sure do lose a lot of junk.”_
> 
> _“They don’t lose it,” Bucky sighs. He’s still standing closer to the rocks at the top of the bank, his hands vanishing into the wall of water he created. “They throw it in here. On purpose. I try to get it out but it’s not like a person or a plant. There’s no water I can touch.”_
> 
> _Steve shrugs. Makes sense._

“Holy… shit.” Steve gasps when the flashback shuts off like a light, then scrambles back to the dock in a panic. The rungs of the old ladder are slippery as he nearly flies up them, then lands hard between his and Bucky’s shirts and the leftover bag from their lunch.

What has he just remembered? How had any of that been possible?

Steve scrambles to the edge of the dock, stares hard into the water he just leapt from. He was always told he had a crazy imagination when he was a kid, the adults in his life always made sure to tell him that after the accident as if they were trying to help him remember who he was before.

What his memory just showed him is a long fucking way off from being a child’s overactive imagination. He remembers the grind under his sneakers from the loose gravel, the soggy bark of all those tree branches. Steve looks down at his adult fingers, remembering the feeling of slick slime on his fingers from one of the decomposing branches he had grabbed when he scrambled back up after collecting his toy.

He even remembers the scent from the bottom of the river.

...Of _Bucky._

“Holy shit!”

* * *

**[Bucky rescuing his good pal Captain America _again_ by [@koreanrage](http://koreanrage.tumblr.com/post/164333090550/first-two-pieces-for-my-collaboration-on) for the Stucky Library Big Bang 2017!] **

 


	10. The Last Flashback

Steve leaves, immediately.

He grabs his clothes by the armful, shoves his things into his duffel bag — his iPad and his phone charger and his toothbrush and what else? Fuck it, he can replace anything he’s forgotten when he gets back to Brooklyn. It all gets thrown into his truck, and within minutes of seeing Bucky eaten by the river Steve is pulling onto the gravel path.

It will lead him into town, then over the bridge, onto highway 81, then home.

Before he even reaches the end of Main Street, with Lehnsherr’s and Luis’s and the thrift shop, an entire summer’s worth of warning signs flash before his eyes. Bucky didn’t have a phone. Bucky didn’t have an address. Bucky didn’t even have a legal identity. Bucky never came with him into town. Bucky never spent the night. Bucky knew everything about Steve’s childhood trips to the river, but nothing about himself. Bucky had been happy to tell Steve about Steve’s own life, everything Steve had conveniently forgotten, filling in the gaps with an amenable smile and chiming laughter.

Steve’s brain damage apparently decided to take a detour in one hell of an odd direction, fabricating something so completely unreal, yet utterly convincing. A hallucination so powerful, he managed to convince himself he was in love with it. Still, Bucky felt so, _so_ real. The realest thing Steve’s touched in years, and he feels the pull of his parent’s cottage, a compulsory need to return, to find Bucky on the end of the dock, to hold him in his arms again and smell his hair, taste his skin and want.

It’s just not possible. No matter how hard he wishes, Bucky isn’t fucking real. Just a fantasy his lonely, injured mind came up with to help him process the trauma of his parent’s death. Or maybe he’s a split personality, like in Fight Club.

...so who _the fuck_ has Steve been making out with on his living room floor? Himself?

“Fuck!” Steve shouts over his steering wheel as he waits at the single stop light in town. It turns green, but he doesn’t accelerate. Instead, he twists the hard plastic steering wheel in his grip, and grinds his teeth together as he tries to understand what his brain is doing to him. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Steve needs a fucking doctor. A CAT scan or drugs or therapy or all of the above, like his parents wanted to take him for that last summer he had been with them.

The light turns red again and the unwanted flashback hits him so hard he screams.

> _“But I don’t want to go back to Brooklyn!” Steve shouts to the back of his father’s seat. The last traffic light out of town has turned red and they are all packed into their station wagon, pointed back home. “You said we’d be here all summer, you promised!”_
> 
> _“Sorry, Steve-o,” Joe says from the passenger’s seat. “We think it really might be time to head back to the city. All this nature might be a bit much for a twelve year old.”_
> 
> _“It’s not!” Steve argues. “It’s really not! And you promised! We have a whole three weeks left! If we leave now that means you broke it which means you’re a liar.”_
> 
> _“Steven Grant Rogers!” Sarah hisses from the driver’s side. She pulls past the red light, and accelerates into faster moving traffic. “I don’t care how much your feelings are hurt, you do not speak to your father that way.”_
> 
> _“Yes, ma’am,” Steve mumbles into his skinned knees. “It’s just. I didn’t get to tell Bucky we were leaving.” “Steve,” his father’s voice brings his head up sharply. “I don’t want to hear another word about that Bucky kid, okay? Not until we can figure this all out.”_
> 
> _“What’s to figure out,” Steve grumps, and crosses his skinny arms over his narrow chest. “He’s my friend. My only real actual friend. And you’re making me leave just because you don’t believe in him.”_
> 
> _Sarah and Joe go quiet for a moment, giving each other looks across the center console of their station wagon that they always do, when they have silent conversations about Steve that they think he doesn’t understand just by watching. “Well,” Sarah says. “Maybe. It’s just. An overactive imagination.”_
> 
> _“He’s so sensitive,” Joe says softly. “I mean, it’s not like he’s doing drugs…”_
> 
> _“I already have enough drugs from the doctor’s,” Steve sasses, even though he obviously knows what they’re talking about. He’s not a delinquent. He does better in school than he does on the playground, and if it weren’t for the fact that he was out sick all the time he likely would have skipped a grade by now._
> 
> _“Alright,” Sarah says, caving in for Steve, like she always does. “Alright. Let’s have Bucky over for dinner.”_
> 
> _“He can’t stay for dinner,” Steve snaps, because he already explained that to them a million times and it’s like they don’t even care that Bucky needs to rest in the evenings. Really, he’s just cranky by now, and teetering on the edge of a tantrum for so long has made everything seem unfair, even when his parents are on the verge of giving him what he wants._
> 
> _“Right,” Joe says. “Because he has to go back to being a river.”_
> 
> _“Right.”_
> 
> _Sarah sighs. She makes a U-turn and they head back to the cottage._
> 
> _The bright yellow truck that kills his parents hits their car as they make the turn onto the gravel road._

Steve gasps when a truck blares its horn at him. He had been sitting at that stop light for god knows how long, letting it cycle through red, yellow and green signals to stop or go or proceed with caution. There’s so little traffic that it took a while for someone to actually pull up behind him.

“Sorry, sorry,” Steve mumbles, but instead of heading across the road onto the highway on ramp, he turns off to the frontage road and parks in front of a bank to catch his breath. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he tells himself, his voice feeling muffled and too close in the cabin of his idling truck.

Just another flashback. Just another shitty flashback of the shittiest day of his shitty life. But it isn’t _just_ another flashback. This flashback just unlocked everything. An old closet door, stuck from age and the slow decay of wood, burst open and the entire collection of his childhood memories came tumbling out. He even remembers Erik Lehnsherr again; the man already had white hair back then. His mom, his dad, Buchanan. All of it, bursting behind his eyes, showing him all the love and care and devotion of his parents, all the joy and faith and adventure of Bucky’s friendship.

It’s almost too much, too overwhelming, his head feels too full. It hurts, all over, like his brain is swelling, painfully encased the rigid shell of his skull. Barbeques, botched swimming lessons, being bullied by a few neighborhood kids he never knew the names of, Captain America, asthma attacks and allergies, drawing — _so much drawing!_ Steve feels the thrill of every fond memory rise in his chest like a warm breeze only to plummet back down, into arctic-cold ice when impossible memories follow quickly after.

Steve spent so many lonely days and warm, summer evenings by himself. His parents thought it was odd that he didn’t like to play with the other kids in town, but by ‘other kids’ they meant kids much younger than Steve, because those were the ones that were his own size. It didn’t take long for Steve to start avoiding his parents by taking his sketchbook to the dock. It didn’t take long for him to start talking to himself, or to the forest, the large lazy flies that sunned themselves on the dry planks beside him. It didn’t take long for the river to start answering him, to start tossing a stone back and forth with whispered responses to unanswered questions. Several summers passed in that fashion.

It was after he fell in that Bucky, _actual Bucky,_ appeared to drag him home to his parents. Steve had never doubted him, not for an instant. It was easy to believe that the river could take a human shape, easy to believe that he liked playing Captain America as much as he did. Easy to believe and fun to keep a secret, until his parents found him exploring the river bank with the water bending unnaturally around Bucky’s will.

Soon the shock and swell of it passes and Steve’s left feeling wrung out, melting into his car seat and gasping for air. Then suddenly it… it isn’t so bad. The memories belong there, gears slotting into grooves that they were built for, all finding their place in a larger narrative. It showed him a slice of his very own personality that he had been missing all his life.

It also showed him the accident had actually been his fault.

If he hadn’t whined about going back to the cottage, they would be on the road home by the time that drowsy truck driver veered out of his lane and T-boned their station wagon. His dad wouldn’t have been killed, instantly. His mom wouldn’t have suffered such severe head trauma that she died while paramedics were trying to resuscitate her. Steve wouldn’t have woken up the county hospital days later, clueless as to why he was so far from Brooklyn. All because Steve believed in something impossible, something he knows for sure is the last, broken part of his brain that needs to be fixed, immediately.

If only Bucky were there Steve could at least have someone to — “Fuck…” Steve whimpers, and plants his forehead onto his steering wheel so that he could let the tears fall into his lap. “Oh my god.” He never expected remembering his summer vacations in Buchanan, Virginia to be so fucking painful but here he is.

Here he is.

* * *

Steve doesn’t know how long he stays like that, curled over his steering wheel, his broad back made into a hard shell, and crying. The sun is already starting it’s lazy way down when his phone rings — not just a text notification but an honest to god call coming through. Steve collapses back against the seat, catches his breath, wipes his nose with the back of his hand.

It’s Clint.

“Hey,” Steve says, and immediately has to clear his throat when his voice cracks. “What’s up?”

“Oh. Hey Steve. Didn’t think you’d actually answer!” Clint’s voice comes out around an obviously full mouth of food. “One sec,” he adds, as he finishes chewing and audibly swallows. “Sorry about that. Pizza just got here. Actually, that’s why I wanted to call — Do you have the master security code for the front door?”

“Oh, um,” Steve has to think as his brain scrambles to recover information from his actual life. “Sure, I think I wrote it on the sheet I left in the kitchen? It’s 122822.”

“Oh! Shit! Sorry.”

There’s an awkward pause, and Steve is painfully reminded how little tact Clint has. “So. You. Um. Ordered pizza, huh?”

“Nah. I just said that so it sounded like I could afford it. I just microwaved some DiGiorno.”

Steve is confused for a second. That doesn’t sound right. “You’re supposed to put DiGiornos in the oven, Clint.”

Clint goes quiet again, and then, huffs out a casual “Huh.”

Steve cracks a smile, despite still feeling sorry for himself. Clint’s good at that, whether he means to or not. He recovers quickly and speaks again, this time around another mouthful of microwaved pizza. “So, uh, how are things? Over there. With your friend.”

Steve laughs, and it’s cynical and ugly even in his ears. “What friend?”

“Aw,” Clint says. “Okay so. The code question was a ruse.” Of course it was. “Nat convinced me to check on how things are going with your, uh… _Bucky._ Sorry to hear it sounds like they’re, uh. A little off target. He sounded like a nice guy, keeping you on your toes.”

Steve nearly drops his phone when it hits him like a ton of bricks: _Clint_ had talked to Bucky. It was weeks ago, over speakerphone, when Steve was recovering from his first swimming lesson and Bucky was finishing off the ceiling tape. Clint had ended it with some shitty comment about Bucky keeping Steve in line.

 _I believe in you!_ Clint had shouted, after they had introduced themselves over Steve’s efforts to deflect. “Hey, you remember Bucky’s voice right?”

“Uh.” Clint clearly doesn’t want to answer that loaded question, still under the assumption that Bucky and Steve had some kind of fight.

“Sorry, it’s important. Bucky’s voice. You remember it?” Steve winces, but forges ahead, despite how weird the question sounds. “It was totally different from mine, right?”

“Not really sure where you’re going with this,” Clint says, laughs nervously, then clicks his tongue. “Of course? He must have been halfway across the room because he came in a bit echoey after you put us on speakerphone. What the hell happened between you two?”

Steve might have been able to fuck around with a different voice, though he seriously doubts it, but now he remembers the conversation. Bucky had been shouting over his shoulder from where he was painting the edges around the corner of the wall that leads from the living room into the hallway. Steve had been close to the front door, with the phone sitting on the floor by his knees. Without the furniture or the carpets in the living room, Bucky’s voice echoed as he shouted over Steve’s embarrassed laughter in order to talk to his friend.

Steve’s head hurts and his eyes sting, his shoulders ache from clenching, but relief floods through him. Maybe he’s losing his mind, but at least one thing is certain; Bucky is a flesh and blood person, and Steve is definitely in love with him. “Thanks Clint. You’re a pal.”

Steve’s hands shake when he puts his truck back into gear. Nothing is going to stop him from getting back to the cottage, even though an impromptu return trip to the cottage after getting this far out of town had been what killed his parents.

Steve swallows, makes a u-turn, and gets back onto Main street. Past Lehnsherr’s, past Luis’s, and past the little thrift shop. He drives for ten minutes into unincorporated Buchanan, turns onto the gravel path that leads to the cottage and parks by the same overgrown tree his truck has lived under all summer.

Bucky is waiting for him, sitting on the porch steps, and smiles when Steve makes his way back up the path. “You locked the door,” he says with a laugh, standing up to greet him. “If I had to wait ten more minutes I’d —”

Steve grabs Bucky by the waist and pulls him into an impatient kiss. Bucky startles at first, goes stiff with indignity after being interrupted, but gives in quickly. He sighs into Steve’s mouth and drapes his arms over his shoulders as he relaxes against him. Steve is hyper-aware of Bucky’s nearness. Of the heat of Bucky's body against his chest, the weight of Bucky's arms, his taste, his scent. Steve sends his hands up Bucky’s body, feeling the muscles, the skin, the bone. He holds Bucky’s jaw, feels the movement of the hinge below Bucky’s ears, which he cups briefly before sending his fingers into Bucky’s long hair. Steve licks into his mouth, sucks on the surprised little sound Bucky makes, then finally breaks the kiss to catch his breath. He holds Bucky’s skull, presses his own forehead into his so hard it almost hurts.

Bucky is real. He is. He’s right here in his arms, and Steve loves him.

“I love you,” Steve says. “I’m losing my mind and I’m seeing things that aren’t real and I’m scared,” he gulps and Bucky’s grey eyes got wide. “But I love you Bucky. I do.”

Bucky just stands there, in the grass at the foot of the stairs, letting Steve hold him and tell him these things, breathing in his air as they press themselves together. Every few minutes Steve kisses him again, but mostly he just keeps his forehead connected to Bucky’s, as if he could physically force the other man into a permanent spot in his brain, so that no Ryder trucks could possibly smash into him hard enough to dislodge his place in Steve’s memory.

“How did your innertubers do?” Steve whispers.

“They got into some trouble further down.” Bucky reports. “There’s some rapids where the current breaks around the old railway bridge.” The old train bridge that the town is currently trying to save as a historic landmark, eight miles to the north. Bucky offers no explanation as to how he got there in time to help, which Steve actually appreciates. He doesn’t really want to hear it. Bucky continues, unaware of Steve’s doubts. “They’ll be okay, now. Just scared.”

“Good. That’s good. Hopefully they’ll be more careful next time.”

“Mm,” Bucky says with a shrug, already moving on. “So what did you go into town for?” His question is petulant, but his voice carries a tiny tremor in it that gives away how worried he had been.

Steve shakes his head. “Oh, Bucky…”

“Hey,” Bucky separates himself from Steve’s needy forehead press, just enough to look into his eyes and for the first time Steve notices how tired Bucky looks. Bucky _never_ looks tired. He’s also wearing a different shirt; some plain v-neck with nothing printed on the front. “So. I maybe wore myself out a little bit today. I might be late tomorrow morning for clean up but I’m glad I caught you before I had to head back.” Bucky smiles, like he always does, before he leans forward to kiss him goodbye.

The hairs on the back of Steve’s neck stand on end. “No,” Steve says, and simultaneously pulls his face away from the kiss while tightening his grip on Bucky’s waist. He knows he’s being possessive but there’s no reason for Bucky to leave, not really. He doesn’t have to go back to the James River, vanish beneath the waves. He doesn’t have to rest back in his own bank, to seek out the energy of the day the river water has absorbed in his absence. “No, no, no. You don’t. Your religion or your family or whatever it is that makes you leave… You can’t.”

“We’ll be back together tomorrow,” Bucky says with a sympathetic laugh, still under the impression that Steve is just being a brat about it. “Just like always. Promise!” Steve hates how naive he is. Bucky is making promises he can’t keep. Steve could have been back on the road to Brooklyn by now, miles away from Buchanan and the cottage and all his fucked up memories. Bucky has no idea what’s going through his head.

“What if we won’t?” Steve’s eyes burn, and he ignores it. “What if I wasn’t here when you got back?”

“What?” Bucky makes a sound that could have been a laugh, if he wasn’t so nervous. “But we were going to clean up tomorrow.” He points this out with an arrogant little huff, like he’s caught Steve in a lie. “We were going to take some pictures so that we could list it on that vacation web site.” When he finally understands Steve’s dark look his face goes pale. “Stop it,” he says, and tears himself free of Steve’s embrace. “I have to go.”

“I almost left!” Steve shouts at Bucky’s back, as he cuts around the corner of the cottage. “Because I watched you turn into a _fucking_ river, I got in my truck to go back to Brooklyn without you. You _never_ would have seen me here again.”

Bucky freezes, puts one hand on the house’s corner, just before he reaches the edge of the woodpile. His voice is strangled when it comes out. “...why?”

Steve is crying again. He doesn’t care. “Because,” Steve says with a gulp, hardening himself against crossing a line he knows shouldn’t be crossed. “Because it couldn’t have been real.”

Bucky drops to his knees. “Oh.” He heaves, like he’s going to vomit, then shivers as he clutches his chest. “Steve. Don’t say that. Please don’t say that.”

Steve almost says it again, but seeing Bucky — happy, cheerful, easy going Bucky — taken to his knees in such obvious suffering goes straight through Steve’s soul. “I’m sorry!” Steve, blurts out, wishing he could take it all back. He rushes to Bucky’s side, drops to his knees, then startles back when Bucky flinches away from his touch.

“Just… It’s dangerous. For me to do this. Vulnerable. Being with you.” Bucky has to breathe between each word. He’s so drenched in sweat that his t-shirt sticking to his body with it. “Did too much today. Hurts.”

“I’m so sorry,” Steve says, panic settling in. “What do you need? Can’t I get you some water?”

Bucky wheezes out a chuckle. “No.” He takes a moment to breathe a few more times before he continues. “I’m going home. Please don’t leave? I’m not ready. Can’t go to Brooklyn yet. Monday. Like we planned. Promise.” Bucky is struggling at this point so Steve can’t tell if he’s swearing his own oath or demanding one from Steve.

“I promise,” Steve says. “I’ll wait for you.”


	11. Saturday

Steve can’t sleep. His brand new mattress is comfortable, but his old sleeping bag is not. He doesn’t want to sleep on the new sheets because he wants to leave them clean and fresh for the renters, but it probably wouldn’t have made much difference.

Being tucked in at night wouldn’t have helped the anxiety roiling through his mind, and he jams his pillow into a tighter roll under his ear figuring that nothing really could. When Steve gets up it will be Saturday, his second-to-last day in Buchanan. He still has all kinds of tiny errands to run before he leaves on Monday morning, and his mind is on overdrive listing them all out, one by one.

Steve huffs, pulls his pillow flat again, and yawns. At least being occupied with his busy day is easier than agonizing over all the weird shit he remembers.

 _Bucky didn’t even deny it,_ Steve thinks, and hides his face in the top of his sleeping bag when his heart clenches at the thought of how Bucky had collapsed. He wishes he could understand it, wishes that all his freshly returned memories made sense out of all his doubts. Instead he wound up caught in circular logic, cycling through blind trust, doubt, and surrender like he’s in some kind of twelve step program of faith. Steve just wishes Bucky would come out and say something, anything, either laugh and tease Steve for his imagination or confess that yes, he is some kind of…

...River spirit?

Steve scrubs his face with both hands. Impossible. He doesn't live in a world of spirits and gods and magic. He lives in Brooklyn. He has brain damage. He has PTSD. All these things are objective facts that make him an unreliable narrator of his own past.

Steve’s guilt swirls when he thinks of the last time he saw Bucky, and he falls back into another cycle of fear and doubt, rolls over one more time, the sleeping bag twisting uncomfortably shut around his shoulders. If he could just explain this to Bucky then maybe he’d understand. Maybe he’d know that Steve can’t actually handle being part of this strange fantasy, and just drop it.

When Steve told Bucky that what he remembered couldn’t be real, Bucky had reacted as if Steve’s words had struck him like stones.

Steve sits up so suddenly at that thought, then nearly flings himself off the bed.

* * *

Evenings here are warm enough for his trunks to already be dry from the swim, so he gets dressed quickly, mostly in the dark to save his night vision. He steps out of the cottage into a night filled with the _creak-groan_ of frogs, and the quiet song of crickets in the tall grass. The stars are out but the patch of forest between the cottage and the dock is still thick enough to hide the path, so Steve uses the flashlight on his phone to carefully pick his way down to the river. He skids down that last, steep step onto the wooden planks, and loose gravel travels after him, clattering down onto the rocks below. He winces as if the noise might accidentally wake someone up, then releases his held breath slowly once the danger has passed.

It doesn’t take long for him to find the polished river rock, perched on the edge of the dock. He’s grown used to seeing it there, every morning when he goes to meet Bucky. He remembers his second trip to Buchanan, when he ran down to the dock to say to the James River, to see if it remembered him. He tells the river about the bullies that beat him up and broke his Captain America figure. Tells him how he’s excited, because he was pretty sure he’d get a new one for his birthday that year. That’s when the river told him to call him _Bucky,_ and Steve laughs at him. The river threw a stone up from the bank, not hard, just enough to bean Steve in his skinny little shoulder. Instead of getting upset, Steve was enthralled by the river’s ability to command the stones from its own bank. It didn’t take long before they had entire conversations, throwing it back and forth. Somewhere along the line, Steve was convinced the stone was magic, a link that made it possible for them to really talk. Bucky never told him otherwise. Even his mother indulged him, and helped him take that photo that she later displayed in her bedroom, like it was an Ansel Adams masterpiece.

Steve sighs, picks it up, feels the sure weight of it in his palm then sits heavily down on the edge of the dock. Now that he’s clear of the trees he switches off his phone and lays flat on his back, staring up at the stars. His birthday was the last time he spent an evening on the dock, when Bucky had shown up with bottle rockets and chocolate cake. There isn’t much point to coming out here once the sun sets, since that’s when Bucky’s gone, but now Steve regrets not spending more time out here at night.

The stars are undeniably _spectacular._

The stone quickly warms in his closed fist, and he can feel his own heartbeat through his chest where he holds it. “I don’t know if you can hear me,” he quietly starts, then cynically huffs out a laugh. “Oh, god what am I doing? I guess I kind of hope you can’t, and I’m just talking to myself, but. I just wanted to tell you what this means for me. To ignore all these doubts. I want you with me so badly I’ll do just about anything. Believe anything. I guess I just want you to know that. If you can hear me.”

This is stupid. Steve kisses the stone and looks deep into the heavens, as if he might find an answer there. It vaults up above of him, like somehow the night sky sinks deeper the longer Steve watches it, swirling like a reflection on the water’s moving surface. It’s hypnotic, and the heat and the frogs and the stars make him feel drowsy and stupid.

“I love you Bucky,” he murmurs, as he drifts into an easy sleep.

* * *

Steve doesn’t really think about going back to bed until he cracks open one eye and finds the sun cresting just over the trees in the West. Did he sleep out here all night? He flexes his shoulders, stiff from laying on the hard wood, then jolts fully awake when he realizes he’s not alone. Bucky is curled against his back, embracing him from behind, knees nestled up into the back bend of Steve’s legs. Steve’s heart swells in his chest, and he rests his head back down. Bucky’s hand is clutching Steve’s and Steve’s hand is clutching the hot little stone.

Steve doesn’t understand Bucky, doesn’t believe Bucky could possibly be anything other than the beautiful flesh and blood person beside him, but he loves him. That’ll have to be enough.

“Mmm,” Bucky murmurs. “You awake?”

“Yeah,” Steve whispers, because waking up side by side with his boyfriend seems to call for it, even if they were already outside. “Yeah I’m awake. How long have you been here?”

“Always,” Bucky says, in that matter of fact way that Steve’s used to by now. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Could have fooled me,” Steve snorts, and rolls over in Bucky’s embrace. “With all that drool on your face.”

“What!” Bucky’s hand claps a hand over his own mouth to check, but he laughs after Steve kisses him right on top of it and finally puts together that he’s being teased. “Punk!”

“You deserved it, letting me sleep out here.” Steve plants another kiss on Bucky’s face with a loud _smeck,_ then rolls over in order to get his legs under him. “Should we get started?”

“Breakfast first,” Bucky says, stretching. He’s wearing his GI Joe t-shirt, the one with just the logo on the front and _‘knowing is half the battle’_ printed on the back. Steve remembers GI Joes; not even half as cool as Captain America. “Then let’s get this place cleaned up.”

So they eat breakfast first, and get the place cleaned up. They don’t really talk about what Steve had said the day before, or Bucky’s reaction. Instead, Bucky asks him about New York, about the city and the people, and about the roads and bridges, like he’s trying to build a wiki in his head about Steve’s neighborhood.

At lunchtime Steve ties off the very last black trash bags of garbage, mostly packaging from his new furniture and shipping materials for all the kitchen utensils he ordered, and tosses it into the back of his truck.

“The usual?” he asks. “Or do you trust me to order whatever Luis’s special is for the day?”

“Actually,” Bucky says, after he tosses the second garbage bag in. “I was thinking I’d come with you.”

Steve spins around, his hand still on the door handle of his truck. “Really?”

Bucky nods. “Well. Yeah. It’s my town. I just never really. I mean. It’d be good to go with you I think,” he trails off, shrugs. “If I’m going to live in New York, I should get used to it.”

“I was worried about that,” Steve admits, and let’s out a relieved sigh. It makes sense that Bucky might be a little agoraphobic. It certainly explains why no one knows him, and why he prefers to stay behind when Steve has to run errands. “Feel free to use me as your shield if you get overwhelmed or anything.”

Bucky snorts derisively at that, but Steve had been sincere. After being such a scrawny mess his whole childhood, he hadn’t expected to hit puberty and bulk up (and up, and up) as he got used to working out. He never thought he’d even have the frame for it, and he still feels awkwardly broad when he walks into some of the small antique shops on Main street with their narrow, teetering displays of delicate china. He may as well use that bulk to protect his friend, if Bucky’s so nervous about being around strangers.

Bucky climbs into the truck and clips his seatbelt on while Steve chews on that in silence. Apparently, Bucky senses that he’s missed something, and sneaks a curious little look over to Steve when he starts the engine. “You really want to protect me?”

“Sure,” Steve says, and pulls out from under the tree. “I know what it’s like to be a little, er, antisocial. I was always so sick as a kid, I couldn’t physically keep up with kids my own age. Younger kids were too immature. I liked books and art and word puzzles and they just wanted to throw things at each other.”

Bucky laughs, and yanks a thick, crumpled Sudoku book out from the passenger door side pocket. “Apparently, a closeted nerd, too.”

“It’s great for a long drive!” Steve shouts defensively, but he’s grinning.

“You’re supposed to be _driving_ on a long drive!” Bucky reasonably argues, scandalized as Steve pulls out onto the gravel road.

“I do them at rest stops. _Annnnyway._ I was always happier to spend a lot of time alone, back then, and I guess it sort of stuck. So I, uh…” Steve clears his throat. He doesn’t want to suggest Bucky might have some kind of social disorder, because somehow that feels a bit too personal. “I just understand if you want to keep a little buffer between you and the rest of the world. In Brooklyn too. If you want.”

Bucky gives him a funny little smile that he can’t quite read. “Sure,” he says.

“So.” Steve swallows to give himself time to think. “Speaking of being a closeted nerd.” That was such a lame opening, he can’t blame Bucky for the look he gives him. “You’re uh. Your religion? It’s not. I mean. It’s okay if we’re in town and we’re together, right?” Bucky’s head cocks to the side, as if he has no idea what Steve’s talking about. As if he’d never heard of fucking homophobia before or backwater towns being full of secluded religious wackjobs. Steve heaves a sigh, because he figures there’s no need to be obtuse about something so important. “Are you out?”

“Out as I’ll ever be,” Bucky says, cheerful enough, and gazes out the windows to watch the trees whiz by as they turn onto the winding road down to Main Street.

The answer isn’t satisfying, but Steve supposes it’ll have to do. Bucky wouldn’t bullshit about something this important. He’ll just try to take Bucky’s lead, to keep his head down, and focus on getting his last errands taken care of before he leaves for Brooklyn.

* * *

It turns out that Bucky is a social fucking butterfly.

He introduces himself to the intense, wheelchair-bound man at the salvage yard. His grumpy old face practically lights up when Bucky gives Steve a swat on the butt after Steve insists on hauling both the trash bags over to the main dumpster. ‘Chuck’ happily introduces himself (to Bucky), then proceeds to give them both a lesson in young love from his days at Oxford, with an English accent that Steve had never even noticed before. Later, when Bucky is gathering up the last bits of paper floating around in the bed of Steve’s truck, Chuck warns Steve that Bucky would have a big guy like him wrapped around his little finger in no time. When Bucky came back into the small front shop in front of the salvage yard, the old man offered them a discount on some candle holder thing that Steve plans to put in the fireplace to discourage people from playing with it.

It was such a bizarre experience that Steve chalks it up to a one-time coincidence, until they pick up their sandwiches at Luis’s Deli.

Bucky charms the pants off Luis himself after complimenting his _not-one-but-two_ new smoothie machines. Steve doesn’t even like smoothies, but Bucky winds up leaving the deli with two _free_ jumbo fruit blasts, in exchange for a promise to give him a good review on Yelp. Steve doesn’t blow Bucky’s cover by telling Luis he doesn’t even have a phone, much less access to the internet. Instead, he settles for a wink and a candid smile from Luis with a quick, “Your boy is pretty fly, Rogers.”

Erik Lehnsherr basically adopts Bucky when he finds out his last name is Barnes, which apparently makes him a member of one of the oldest families in town. Steve is so agape to hear his last name for the first time, that he says nothing when Bucky wrinkles his nose and continues the conversation with Erik, like it was nothing. “They weren’t very nice people,” Bucky frankly admits, in the way that he oftentimes states opinions like they’re facts. “But they built the very first dock in the river. It’s still there, farther on the East side, and people used it as a little ferry dock before the coal bridge was built.”

When they get back into the truck and sip on their melting, frosty beverages, Steve grumpily asks him why he never told him his last name before.

“You never asked,” Bucky says. He’s not even trying to sound snotty, from the sincere way his voice jumps with surprise. “Do they have smoothies in Brooklyn?”

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says, jealousy momentarily derailed by the naive question. “Of course. It’s like hipster central there now.”

“What’s a hipster?”

“Uh,” Steve gives a half shrug. “Well. People who like all kinds of organic and earthy foods. Thick rimmed glasses. Man-buns. Artsy types.”

Bucky puts his fingers through his long hair, gathering it in the back. “Like this?”

Steve glances over quickly, then back to the road as soon as he catches sight of Bucky’s chest pushed out from the way he holds his arms over his head. “Jesus. Going to make me get into an accident,” he huffs out, and he knows he’s already turning red.

Bucky laughs, picks up his smoothie and licks the straw back into his mouth. “I guess we could be hipsters then.”

If Clint had called Steve a hipster he would have taken it as an insult, but Bucky’s so charmed by this new word he’s just learned and doesn’t mean anything by it. “You can be anything you want, Buck.” Steve just chuckles as they turn onto the gravel road that leads to the riverside cottages, knowing old Chuck was right and he really is doomed. “It’s New York. That’s the idea.”

“Hm,” Bucky says, giving an even longer pull on his straw and Steve swallows.

Driving with a boner sucks.

Steve parks under his tree (technically, unincorporated Buchanan’s tree, but Steve’s been parking under it all summer so he thinks of it as his) and Bucky has no problem jumping out of the truck. He pulls out the candle holder too, since it had been on the floor by his feet in an old paper shopping bag that Chuck seemed particularly proud to have found, just for Bucky. Steve is much slower, taking the moment of solitude to adjust his aching dick before he even opens his door.

“You okay?” Bucky says, trotting back down the path when he realizes Steve isn’t by his side.

“Fine,” Steve says, grabbing the shopping bags from the back of the truck. “Just thirsty.”

Bucky’s eyebrows pop up in surprise, so he tilts his remaining smoothie towards Steve, offering him a sip. Steve smirks, licks up the straw and takes a long pull, keeping eye contact while he sucks as hard as he can. Bucky’s eyes go wider, and his lips part as his eyes drop down to Steve’s mouth. “Oh.”

“Mmhm,” Steve hums, taking one more long pull before he releases the straw with a pop, then smirks. Bucky’s blush starts at the tip of his nose, then opens up along the tops of his cheeks when Steve takes far longer than necessary to lick his lips.

Yeah, Bucky. How do you like it.

Steve doesn’t expect sex, not for a long time (maybe Bucky is waiting for a marriage proposal?) but he still feels that pull of something like a next step in their relationship. He wants to do something with Bucky. Something special, an exchange of intimacy in place of sex. He watches Bucky turn as red as a tomato as his friend considers the drink in his hand and Steve stares. Suddenly, it hits him. “Do you think I could draw you?”

“Sure,” Bucky says, looking up and blinking a little too quickly. Then smiles with his whole body, shoulders lifting up as he beams. “I mean. Yes! Please.”

* * *

They already lost the light by the time they eat their late lunch, so they spend the rest of the early evening watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey on Steve’s iPad. Bucky uses half of Steve’s chest as a pillow, which is fine by him because he gets to kiss the back of Bucky’s head as they explore the galaxy together, and feel the soft, curious little hum Bucky makes about the vastness of space all the way in the bottom of his stomach.

The next morning, they rush through the last of Steve’s preparations for his renters, and after one last _last_ trip into town for more sandwiches and smoothies, Bucky insists it’s time for Steve to draw his picture. It’s Sunday, their last day in Buchanan, and somehow it feels appropriate for Steve to try and resurrect his old passion. It was either that, Bucky argues, or they’d play ‘Captain America & Bucky’ again. Steve shoves the action figure in his duffel bag while declaring the old toy was captured by Red Skull, and grabs his sketchbook.

Steve brings a wooden crate with them down to the dock, spends about ten minutes arranging it perfectly, only to move it over to the opposite side of the dock once Bucky finally takes a seat. Bucky’s mouth puckers curiously sideways when he looks over Steve’s shoulder. “You don’t want the river in the background?”

“No,” Steve says, pushing a finger through his box of pencils while he tries to remember how to start drawing someone’s portrait. “There’s no way I’ll get to do the background since I barely — yes, that’s it. No, stay right there — since I barely remember how to do this. I just want to make sure not to get you in direct sunlight. The sun’ll hurt your eyes after another hour or two.”

“Hour or two?” Bucky huffs. “What about lunch? You drew a lot quicker when you were twelve.”

“I did everything quicker when I was twelve,” Steve snorts. Really, he has no idea what he’s doing. He might remember drawing, might remember the classes his parents sent him to at the community center, but his hands haven’t touched real art supplies since… well, since his last time in Buchanan. He sits cross-legged with with sketch book, looks up and frowns. “This isn’t… right.”

“Sweet talker,” Bucky snickers.

“Hush you,” Steve mumbles, then slaps his sketchbook down. He plants a kiss on Bucky’s forehead and sprints up the path. “I’ll be right back!” Steve stumbles over the fern that he had cut back at the beginning of summer, skids around the woodpile and snatches a folding chair from his tiny deck, then runs all the way back. He doesn’t even know what the hurry is, Bucky isn’t going to turn into a pumpkin while he isn’t looking.

Steve makes it back after only a few minutes, panting but excited. He hasn’t done this in so long, but his hands are practically twitching for relief at this point. “Okay, better,” he declares, and sits on the edge of the chair, now positioned higher than Bucky.

“How do you want me?” Bucky says, glancing up at him through the fringe of his long hair. His hands are clasped together between his knees and his shoulders are shrugged up, protectively. His grey eyes are filled with water, glittering in the sun that filters through the overhanging treetops, and Steve can tell he had been chewing on his lower lip, which is still shiny with spit.

“Just like that,” Steve whispers, barely able to hold back from kissing him.

Steve measures a few reference points by holding up his thumb, an instinct he hadn’t even thought of until he just did it. He quickly sketches out a few ovals on his paper that — if everything worked out like it was supposed to — would become Bucky’s face, Bucky’s shoulders, Bucky’s chest and Bucky’s hands. He gets the loose outline in the rough approximation of Bucky’s pose then starts filling in the details, starting from Bucky’s interlaced fingers. Now that he’s looking so closely, really studying him, Steve notices tiny details he never picked up on before. The fact that Bucky’s left thumbnail is chipped. The tiny scar on the first segment of his right pinkie. The hairless top of his hand, and the perfectly smooth, elegant pale underside of his wrist.

Steve’s pencil eventually wears down and he pokes around in the box for a metal sharpener, gets his point back, and goes right back to sketching the tops of Bucky’s knees. Steve’s teachers had always been surprised, even as a little kid, that he managed to have a perfectly even workflow, picking one place to start and building his picture from there, details rippling outward from one, precise starting point. Most other artists flit from one element of a picture to another as the entire thing gradually fills in. Steve just figured it was his A-type personality taking over his creative side, but really, that’s how he saw pictures. One, tiny detail unlocking a whole image, like the way his flashback at the town’s stoplight had thrown open the closet door holding back his summertime memories.

Soon the sketch has knees and a t-shirt, shoulders, and the precious little dip of visible collarbone outside of the neckline. Bucky’s throat is foreshortened away, but his fantastic chin is on full display, that little dimple getting all the care Steve can manage. He sticks out his own tongue and bites it in order to concentrate, uses his finger to smudge in the shading as the hours pass and the light subtly shifts. Finally, Steve adds the slashes of Bucky’s hair, even his beautiful, dark lashes.

His eyes and mouth are the hardest part, since what Steve wants to capture the most is the water in them. He cheats. He does Bucky’s nose first, then fixes the perspective on the ear, before finally finding the spark of inspiration and a way to make Bucky’s mouth as juicy as it looks in real life on his paper. It’s not perfect — it’d never be perfect — but Steve finally sits back with a breath, like he’s coming up for air, and turns his sketchbook around.

“Okay,” he says, exhausted. How long has he been sketching? Bucky blinks, releases his hands from their own grasp, shakes out his fingers and stands up for the first time since Steve started. He arches his back in a stretch.

“That’s amazing,” he sighs. “That’s… really, something else.” Bucky picks up the sketchbook, and his fingers gently glide down the edge of the paper to pick up the texture. “It really looks like him.”

“What?” Steve yawns, not quite catching why Bucky referred to himself in the third person. “Oh my god, what time is it?”

“Just past five,” Bucky says, handing the sketchbook back and Steve freezes.

“You’re kidding.” Steve’s stomach cries out in anger, and he pats it. “Damn! Why didn’t you say something? I didn’t realize I got so carried away!”

“You were amazing, Steve. You’re not even that focused when you’re replacing light switches.”

Steve laughs, then groans when he goes to stand. He can’t believe how stiff he is, but since he’s been sitting in the same spot for four hours straight he’s not surprised. Bucky’s hands must be killing him. “Thank you,” Steve says. “For letting me put you through that.”

“It’s beautiful,” Bucky insists, and does that full body smile again, his eyes turning up into crescents. “No one’s ever wanted to draw me like this before. You make me feel so special just for… well, this.” Bucky looks down at himself, self conscious, shy, and Steve puts his finger under Bucky’s sharp chin to tilt his face back up.

“You are so special,” Steve tells him. He finally kisses his mouth and uses his free hand to gather him in close, by the hip. “I love you so much.”

“Hmm,” Bucky moans into the kiss.

Steve’s body is completely wrung out, shaking even from skipping lunch, otherwise he probably would’ve had a hard time pressed so close against him. Drawing Bucky felt a little bit like sex, putting that beautiful face on paper in the most personal way Steve knew how. It’s nothing like a selfie.

Bucky laughs into Steve’s mouth when Steve’s stomach angrily interrupts them with another shout of hunger, and Steve finally gives in. “We still have our sandwiches up at the house. Eat with me before you go?”

“Sure,” Bucky says immediately. “Do you think the smoothie is still cold?”

Steve winces, because he hates it when Bucky is disappointed. “Don’t think so,” he says, gathering up his pencils, his eraser and shakes his head when he sees the huge pile of shavings floating around inside it with all his supplies. What a mess. “We can put it in the freezer though.”

They trudge back up the path, get inside, and Bucky sets up the sprawling candle holder in the fireplace with the fat pillar candles they got from Lehnsherr’s while Steve pulls out the sandwiches. They are a little sloppy after being left on the counter all afternoon, but the fragrant pesto chicken fills the small cottage living room. “Well,” Steve says, finding Bucky in the living room and looks over his good work. “That looks damn good.”

Steve puts the plates down on his ‘FJÄLLBO’ coffee table, picks up the handheld starter from a little hook in the fireplace brick, and lights the candles. There’s about six of them, in various rises on the metal stand, which is designed to look a bit like leafy branches.

“Romantic…” Bucky says softly, and draws his knees up to his chin. Steve is about to tease him about it but it suddenly strikes him as odd that Bucky hasn’t immediately gone for his sandwich. There is never a moment when he doesn’t go straight for the food once it’s out.

“Something on your mind?”

“I’m worried about Brooklyn,” Bucky confesses, and manages to curl up even tighter, so Steve sits down next to him, mimicking his posture. They face their little candlelit fireplace, sitting on the very edge of the living room rug. “I’m worried about what we’ll do there.”

Steve shrugs. “Honestly, I do most of the same stuff. Fix broken faucets. Paint. Reconnect people’s cable boxes. I uh, I restart a bunch of modems too.”

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

“Um,” Steve relaxes his arms and falls back, bracing himself on his palms. “I do. I mean, eventually. When you’re ready? I like sex, but I know you have to wait.”

Bucky’s mouth makes a sad, sideways smile. “I don’t have to wait,” Bucky says and Steve’s heart jumps, selfishly excited over the idea that he has some kind of immediate chance. “Waiting means that eventually you get it.”

Oh.

Ohhhhhh.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Why?”

Bucky glances at him through the fringe of his hair, much like he had when Steve had been sketching him, except instead of the beautiful sparkling sky reflected in his grey eyes, the angry orange fire has set them alight. “You know how I told you names mean something? The meaning people put behind names.”

“Like Pluto, being a planet.”

“Like Pluto,” Bucky agrees. “Except it’s more than just names. It’s faith. It’s what people believe in. And people believe in sex.”

Steve’s brain skips a beat, then an edge of anger takes him by surprise. “What? The fuck? Does that mean?” If this is some conservative religious bullshit where Bucky has to be a pure virgin to satisfy some outdated idea of being marriageable or something, Steve might just blow his top.

“I — It means,” Bucky struggles, picking up on Steve’s frustration and trying to explain quickly, in a way he thinks Steve will understand. “People put a lot of meaning on sex. I mean, call it culture or society or biology or what but sex means something.”

“It… doesn’t have to mean something,” Steve argues, feeling like he’s missing whatever point Bucky’s trying to make.

“It means something to _you_. It means something to me, too. And what it means challenges... me. It challenges this form, to stay this way. If I stay this way… I just, can’t.”

Steve shakes his head. “This doesn’t… I don’t understand.”

Bucky sighs, puts his chin back onto the tops of his knees. “I know. It’s impossible to explain. I just can’t.”

“So you’re asexual?” Asexual is something Steve understands. It’s a real, human thing that happens to plenty of people. It’s a label he can identify and apply to his own life, and how he’d handle being in a relationship with someone. “Being ace isn’t something that will scare me off, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Bucky laughs, then groans. He stretches his legs out in front of him, his sock feet winding up closer to the fireplace as he leans back on his hands, like Steve. “Oh boy, am I _not_ asexual. I didn’t even realize I would be _any_ kind of sexual, until I met you, but goddamn I know I am now.”

“So. You do want to have sex. With me.” Well, that’s a start.

Bucky grins, shakes his head with a bitter frown, then grins again, like he just can’t help it. “Oh, fuck it.”

He flips over into Steve’s arms, latches his teeth onto Steve’s bottom lip and Steve barely has time to react before he can feel Bucky’s own erection grinding into his. Steve grabs onto Bucky’s slim waist with both hands, urging him to continue riding Steve’s lap, and pushes his own pelvis up, between Bucky’s legs.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathes out, between kisses, and Bucky moans into his mouth and kisses him more. Bucky’s hands sneak under the hem of Steve’s shirt, scrambling up until they reach his aching nipples. “Fuck!”

“I want to touch every single part of you with these hands,” Bucky groans, latches onto Steve’s neck with his hot little mouth when Steve’s back arches at the sound of his voice. His hands massage Steve’s chest, which burns for it, and his fingers alternate rubbing and pinching at his over-stimulated nipples.

“Off,” Steve huffs, and struggles just enough underneath him for Bucky to get a hint and break apart, just long enough for them both to pull off their shirts. Bucky freezes, panting, his lips bruised red and wet with spit. “Jesus Bucky,” Steve coos, reaching up to brush along the firm curve of Bucky’s arm. “You’re so beautiful.”

“I… I shouldn’t.” Bucky is still riding Steve’s lap, the front of his jeans straining over the shape of his dick. He bites his own lip as he traces the line between Steve’s muscles, trailing down past his navel and stopping at his belt buckle. Then he drags his eyes back up, looks at Steve with the most lost expression he’s ever had, and asks, “What do I do?”

Steve can’t believe this decision is now in his hands. Literally, as he braces Bucky in his own grip right there on his lap. His hips ache to thrust upward, his dick craves friction and moisture and the touch of Bucky’s hot skin. Steve swallows past the lump in his throat, and doesn’t answer. Instead, he looks Bucky in the eye when he takes one, sure hand and unbuckles Bucky’s belt. Bucky doesn’t move, doesn’t resist at all, when Steve plucks apart his fly, gently easing down the zipper. Steve has to use both hands to spread open Bucky’s jeans, and he can see the damp spot on Bucky’s boxer briefs where precome has soaked through the fabric.

Bucky gasps, and his thighs squeeze at Steve’s hips when Steve cups the hard line of Bucky’s dick through the soft cotton. “Ah!” Bucky lets his head fall back when Steve strokes him. “Oh, fuck!”

“Bucky,” Steve says. “I’ll give you anything you want. Even this,” he promises, and uses his thumb and forefinger to gently pinch the tip, until the damp spot on his underwear gets even darker. “I love you.”

Bucky’s hand snaps up, grabs Steve’s wrist, and that’s the end of it. Steve feels his heart clench when he sees that Bucky is crying.

“Oh, Bucky…”

“Just,” Bucky gasps, holding Steve’s hand there, where it remains wrapped around his dick. “Just let me feel this. A little longer.” Steve doesn’t move, just lets Bucky come back down, shivering under the sentation of the touch. “I can’t do this, Steve. I wish I could. I want to. I’m scared.”

“Bucky,” Steve finally unlatches his hand from Bucky’s grip, and gently nudges his jeans back up on his hips. “I want you. I’ll always want you. But if you can’t do it, then that’s fine too.”

“I won’t be able to stop myself,” Bucky whines. He rolls off Steve’s hips then, collapsing onto his back. He lifts his hips to hastily reassemble his jeans. “Fuck and it’s so late. I have to go.”

“Sure,” Steve says, keeping his voice soft. He doesn’t bother to try and look decent. “Whatever you need. We can talk about it on our way to Brooklyn.”

“I’m not going to Brooklyn, Steve,” Bucky flippantly declares, shoving his feet back into his boots, and Steve isn’t sure he’s heard him right. “I’m not going to leave my home. I’m not going to stay with my asshole — _cousin._ I’m not going to have sex with you and get trapped forever in some dirty city —”

“Hey,” Steve tries to stop the tirade because Bucky’s lost him. “Bucky you can always come back here. Don’t act like I’m going to kidnap you or something.”

“Don’t you get it!” Bucky’s face immediately flashes to anger and Steve startles back. He’s never seen Bucky angry before. “I can’t help myself. When I’m around you, when I’m like this, you’re all I can think about! It’s not natural for me! I just. I need,” Bucky stops, catches his breath while his hand goes to his temple. “I’m going home. I already stayed up too long. We already went too far.”

“Bucky,” Steve begs. “Please, let’s just talk about this? Tomorrow morning, if you have to go now. I swear I’m not mad!” Steve swallows. He’s not mad, but his heart is breaking and his throat is swelling shut.

Bucky stops at the door, hesitating like he might be considering it, then pushes out into the night.

Steve stares at the hole Bucky just left in the air of the room, listens to his own breath, coming up short, louder than the gentle rhythm of the frogs outside, but not louder than his heart, hammering away in his chest.

“Bucky, wait!”

Steve scrambles up, throws his boots on and stumbles out of the door. He flings himself down the steps, sprints around the woodpile, cursing when his shin catches the edge of a sharp branch, leaps over the fern at the top of the path and stumbles down the little hill to the dock. A shower of dirt and rocks fall after him and he’s out of breath, but Bucky is standing there, at the edge of the dock, staring out across the moonlit water.

“Bucky!” It’s swirling fast, and Steve can feel the river’s pull as he walks out onto the wood. Suddenly the planks feel delicate under his feet, like the brittle wood could collapse at any moment and plunge him into the raw elemental water beneath him. “Buck?”

“I… I can’t stop this,” Bucky says softly. He’s planted himself on the edge of the dock, like he can’t move forward, like he’s stranded. “Something’s wrong… something’s already changed. Even though it didn’t happen.”

There’s something in Bucky’s tone that Steve finds deeply unsettling, something lost and fractured, like some great, sacred rule has just been broken and Bucky isn’t even sure what that means.

“Is it because I drew you?” Steve quietly speculates. “It meant so much, to put you on paper. To have something of you that I touched, that I made from my own two hands.” Steve approaches him carefully, understanding nothing about what he’s seeing, what he’s hearing, but knows down to his very core that it’s something he needs to stop. Quietly, pathetically, Steve asks, “Why don’t you come back inside? We can talk about it. I swear I’ll listen. I’ll understand this time, promise.”

Bucky shakes his head, looks up at the sky. “I don’t even understand what’s happening,” Bucky confesses. “And I’m eternal.”

“E-eternal?” Steve follows Bucky’s gaze upward, as if the answers were there, waiting for them in the stars. “You’re… the river. Aren’t you.”

“Yes,” Buck sighs, and his face softens, like he can finally relax. “Yes, I’m the James River. I’ve been called that for a few hundred years by now. Before that I was Powhatan. Before that, I was Tsenacommacah. I haven’t always been, but I’ll always be. Or I was supposed to. In nineteen forty-five, a soldier fell from the coal bridge. He died on impact. There was nothing I could do. But since then I’ve been able to…” Bucky trails off, and his shoulders slump. “I’ve been able to _live._ It just never made sense to live so _much_ until I met you.”

Steve gulps, takes another few steps forward but his legs simply stop working when he gets closer. “I believe you,” he insists. “Bucky, I do, I swear it!”

“I don’t think it’s enough,” Bucky almost whispers, voice still hitching with worry.

“Bullshit!” Steve screams. “You said that names are important? You said that believing in things give them power? I believe in you! I believe in us! I love you, Bucky. That has to be enough.” Steve’s chest heaves as he sobs, voice cracking over the words. “It has to.”

“There are things that are more eternal than rivers,” Bucky says, and his voice has changed, tinny and hollow. “The clouds we came from, the oceans we all strive to reach. I think I have to answer to them now. I don’t think it’s about us. Not anymore…” Bucky turns around, and Steve feels faint.

Bucky’s barely there. Just a hint of a person, a faded outline, glistening with the reflection of stars from above. His eyes form the brightest of spots, swirling nebula of silver. The thin membrane containing him shimmers with broken light, droplets of him bead up and hover around his edges, floating in and out of his human shape.

Steve isn’t meant to see this. Suddenly, he thinks he’s losing his mind, thrown into a reality wholly outside of the human experience. It creates a sort of awesome terror inside his chest, something that fights him, something that tells him he needs to flee immediately.

“Steve,” Bucky’s voice comes from nowhere and everywhere, from far back in Steve’s impossible memories, to everywhere in Steve’s deepest fantasies. “I love you, too. I’ll be back. I promise!”

Steve lunges forward, grabs Bucky’s arm as he falls. It does no good. Bucky’s arm splashes away, disintegrating as soon as Steve tries to catch him, evaporating out of his grip. What’s left of Bucky smiles all the way down to the water without it.

Steve drops to his knees and the moment is suddenly over. He sees nothing but the dark, swirling water, lunging against the pylons of his parent’s old deck, like it always does. There’s no sense of terror, no sense of awe, just Steve and the frogs and the crickets and the current. The stars above them. Buchanan around them.

Just another quiet, summer evening on the river.

* * *

Bucky breaks his promise.

Steve puts off leaving for hours, pacing away his entire Monday on the dock, then finally drives into town when the sun begins to set.

He leaves the cottage keys with Erik Lehnsherr, who agreed to trade it off to his renters after he gets it posted on Airbnb.

He buys one more sandwich from Luis, for the road, but doesn’t bother with the smoothie. He visits Chuck, thanks him for the candle holder, and when Chuck asks him where Bucky is, all Steve can tell him is, “Bucky’s at home.”

He makes the eight hour drive back to Brooklyn alone.

* * *

 

_Bucky’s barely there. Just a hint of a person, a faded outline, glistening with the reflection of stars from above. His eyes form the brightest of spots, swirling nebula of silver. The thin membrane containing him shimmers with broken light, droplets of him bead up and hover around his edges, floating in and out of his human shape._

**[Artwork by[@koreanrage](http://koreanrage.tumblr.com/post/164333106520/and-the-last-piece-for-my-collaboration-on) for the Stucky Library Big Bang 2017!] **


	12. Homecoming

“I told you, it only leaks _sometimes,”_ Mrs. Klein says, for the fourth time, after Steve swipes a sweaty, dirty hand across his forehead and tells her again that he can’t find the issue. “It might just not be leaking _now.”_

“Well, I replaced the gaskets anyway,” Steve sighs, and finally squeezes himself out of the cabinet beneath Mrs. Klein’s sink. For the millionth time he fantasizes about replacing all the cabinetry in the building, after spending all morning with his extra wide shoulders jammed into extra tiny, turn of the century little openings. “Even if the leak wasn’t coming from the bend, the old rings were degrading.” Steve rests one hand on his knee as he tugs on the pipe one last time, testing the seal. “I have to go talk to Charlie now about the smoking situation, so please just, uh, if you could _text_ me if it starts again?”

“I’ll call,” Mrs. Klein insists, because she always calls instead of texts no matter how many times Steve asks, so Steve gives her polite wave and heads downstairs.

It’s the first of September, and the hallways of his building are slightly less drafty since he replaced all the weatherstripping on the windows and doors. Still, a frigid breeze snaps up from the back stairwell since the exit door is propped open with a brick. Steve can already smell cigarette smoke as he heads down, and he reminds himself to avoid being grumpy when he tells Charlie not to smoke outside, under the (goddamn fucking sensitive!) smoke detectors.

It’s been a little over a month since he came back, and his tenants welcomed him home like petulant children rather than adult neighbors. Clint had managed to work some miracles around the place to keep it up while he was gone, but Steve has never had to fiddle with so many squeaky floorboards, sticky door locks, clogged toilets, flickering light fixtures or ‘fiddly’ toilet flush handles — whatever that meant. It’s like his tenants had saved up every little thing wrong they could possibly think of and wasted no time at all springing it on him. Steve eventually started designating days of the week for particular floors, since he had been running up and down the entire height of the building several times a day between the first floor tenant’s suspicious roach sightings and the top floor’s leaky ceilings, in a summer with no rain.

Before Steve knew it, weeks had gone by since he got back from Buchanan. Weeks since the last time he saw Bucky.

Really, he’s grateful for the distractions, even if it turns out the blind tenant in unit one really was stealing people’s mail, or he had to take a hundred awkward phone calls from Mrs. Klein. When he’s aching and exhausted after a day of running up and down stairs to different units, or long, tedious trips to Home Depot, or the breaks he takes to hit the gym with Clint, it means he can throw himself into bed after an hour or two of television at night, too tired to think about it.

It helps, but not nearly enough. Steve never considered that it could be lonely, living in an apartment building, surrounded by people he’s on a first name basis with. At what point was he no longer the person who happily hid under a blanket whenever it rained with a steaming cup of coffee and a pile of sudoku puzzles, a few historical fiction novels and Nina Simone?

Steve abruptly stops on the landing, and his hand makes a tight fist around the bannister. Remembering something as innocuous as sudoku plucks a chord inside his chest that leaves him shaking and cold, and even a little bit angry. He’s rented out the cottage in Buchanan three times since he’s left, and after paying Pietro and Wanda some money to clean it up after each tenant, made a tidy little sum of money to replenish his dangerously low savings account. The cottage has been empty for weeks though, ever since the weather went bad and all the hikers that came out to enjoy the fall leaves have long since returned home.

He hasn’t bothered to ask anyone from Buchanan if they’ve seen Bucky around. He knows he likely hasn’t left the riverbed since Steve last saw him.

Steve takes in a shaky breath, trying to force the image of Bucky’s placid smile out of his mind, of the way his body came apart as he fell, splashes of water into splashes of water.

It’s not fair, whatever happened in Buchanan. It’s not fair that drawing Bucky would make him lose his form. It’s not fair that sex would trap him in it. Steve still doesn’t understand how or why it happened but knows there’s not much he can do to fix it.

For now he focuses on his uncomplicated life, and carefully ignores the gaping hole Bucky left in it.

Steve takes a breath, blinks away the stinging in his eyes, and hurries back up to his own apartment. He needs to eat some dinner, but he couldn’t possibly focus on eating when he smells this bad. Charlie’s tobacco mixed with whatever came out of Mrs. Klein’s drain and the sweat of both hauling and assembling new furniture for Tera in number four has left him with a sense that if he stands still long enough flies will start to swarm around him.

The shower is practically scalding, hot enough to turn every inch of him bright pink, and scrubs rougher than he needs to just to make sure his anxiety washes down the drain along with everything else. It’s harsh therapy, but it helps. He leaves feeling raw and fresh, pulls on his thickest shawl collar sweater over a cotton henley and climbs into a pair of soft, worn jeans. He settles down with a fresh cup of black tea, casts a drawing tutorial to his television from his iPad, and leans into the soft arm of his sofa with his brand new sketchbook and picks up his latest sketch where he left off.

The lesson reminds him of watching Bob Ross on television when he was little, only instead of simple paintings, the tutorials go through basic drawing techniques. How to use proper tools for certain projects, different paper types and pencils, and capturing form and figures with nothing but graphite. Tonight’s lesson is about capturing motion, and even though the moving corner of a bedsheet is nothing like a river, Steve can’t help but think of one as they go over the delicate folds and the energy traveling along sharp, diagonal lines.

Steve uses noise canceling headphones for these lessons, blocking out all sound outside of the instructor’s pleasant Brazilian accent, and for a few hours at least he’s able to exist in this isolation without feeling the pang of loneliness. His floating sheet looks more like a cluster of corn chips by the time the lesson winds down, but he still feels accomplished.

He checks his phone, considers going to bed, turns the page of his sketchbook and starts again.

* * *

It’s mid-October when he finally has a few days in a row to himself. Despite winding up thoroughly bored, he doesn’t feel like trotting downstairs into number fourteen to pick up where he left off on his last project. The renovations in the building’s dumpiest apartment are coming along painfully slowly, and even though he tells himself that it’s because he has to do it entirely alone, he really knows he’s just dragging his feet. Clint had told him earlier that day that he needed to give himself a break, and Natasha had promptly stolen Clint’s phone to tell them both they need to burn off their excess energy by getting back to the gym. Steve has to admit he half agrees with her. He’s been sweating buckets since he got back, working on so many projects at once, but it’s not the same as a routine workout.

Steve stares at his untidy collection of art supplies, slowly taking over the entire space between his sofa and his living room window, and figures he should at least get out of his apartment for a while. It’s even been relatively sunny out, even though there’s a sharp wind blowing off the East River.

“Huh,” Steve murmurs to himself. It doesn’t take long for him to climb into his jogging clothes, a collection of Under Armour for cold weather, then digs around in his sock drawer for his new compression shirt. His heart skips a beat when his fist closes around something hard and round, the familiar shape of his river rock from Buchanan presses into his palm through the fabric of a single sock he lost the mate to years ago. When he snatched it up from the dock the morning he left he didn’t really think about the consequences of keeping such a painful reminder with him, but he could never bring himself to discard it. When he finally got home after that miserable drive, he shoved it into the very back of his dresser and tried to put it out of his mind, along with everything else about his summer in Buchanan.

Steve’s heart pounds as his fingers grip tightly enough around the rock to hurt. “Bucky…” he whispers. “I miss you so much.”

The tears come quickly, like a flash flood, and Steve claps his free hand over his mouth when a small sob escapes. “Fuck,” he coughs, unable to stop his chest from hitching, or the grimace that pulls open his mouth to show his teeth as the sobs break free. He looks up at the ceiling, wishing it were the stars overhead in Buchanan. Wishing he was back there. Wishing he was _home._

Steve looks down, finds the stone in his hand. He doesn’t remember pulling it out of the sock, doesn’t remember taking it out of the drawer. A bead of water slips off the polished surface, and his heart leaps before he realizes it was his own tears dripping from his face that that made it wet. Steve croaks out a small, cynical laugh. “Alright,” he says, and puts the rock down on the dresser with a clack. “Losing it. Absolutely losing it.”

The rock itself isn’t magical. Maybe, at one point, he used it to play some kind of game with Bucky, a version of telephone where he could skip messages across the James River. Thinking of Bucky as a literal river, or some kind of spirit, makes Steve confused, so he prefers to think of him as something between a fantasy and a missed connection. Someone precious and beloved, but far away. An impossible goal, out of reach.

Steve glares at the stone. The stupid polished piece of Buchanan that Bucky hit him with, before they had even met. Knocked him flat on his back, and probably gave him a concussion. More brain damage on top of the scars he already carries. The picture of it blurs through a wave of fresh tears and Steve grinds his teeth. This is ridiculous. It’s been months. Steve needs to make up his mind if he’s going to believe this river spirit business or not. Needs to make up his mind if he fell in love with an actual person or just had a momentary infatuation with a guy he barely knew, in some backwater town in Virginia.

“That’s enough,” Steve tells himself. He snatches his compression shirt out of his drawer and heads out, dragging it over his Under Armour that will protect him from the worst of the weather.

Steve is one of those strange people that actually enjoys running, when he’s not trapped in the gym. The weather is crisp but clear, and the sensation of cold air rushing in and out of his nostrils somehow makes his eyes feel more open than they had been in weeks. He doesn’t have a particular destination in mind, but he figures it’s not quite an accident when he crosses Kent Avenue, where South 8th Street dead-ends at the East River.

There’s a few ugly buildings between him and the actual water — the ferry offices, some restaurant, and a few parking lots. Steve can hear the water though, can see the expanse of it reach well over to the Lower East Side, shining the distance. Some truck blares its horn at a motorcyclists in the intersection behind him, startling Steve out of his half-formed thoughts, and he picks up his pace, jogging along the chain link fence towards the ferry offices, figuring it was as good a direction as any.

Not too much further down the toe of his sneaker collides with something that skitters away in front of him, and he stops to check what he might have stepped on. At first he thinks he’s just kicked an old, bent nail, but quickly realizes the sliver of metal is a broken link, fallen from what looks like a very large laceration in the fence. Just beyond this hole is a narrow walkway, a little hidden path between the ferry’s office buildings, with steps that lead right down to the water. He looks over his shoulder, and before he can even consider what the hell he’s doing, he pulls back one side of the ruined fence like a heavy curtain and slips through.

 _Totally fucked,_ he thinks as he trots through the open parking lot. The building probably has security cameras, and he’s trespassing, clear as day. Instead of listening to this sound reasoning, he listens to his heart, chattering in his chest, urging him to go on, thrilled by the sudden decision he’s apparently made. He takes the narrow walkway between the two cement buildings, quickly skips down the cement steps, and there it is.

The East River is a muddy sort of green, dark and impenetrable as it stretches across the divide between Brooklyn and the other boroughs. He’s standing behind a single, rusted rail, gripping the dirty metal and leaning only a little further than the line it draws between him and the river. There’s a messy embankment between his cement perch and the water, so he’s still about twenty feet away from the river itself. The wind cuts sharply across this exposed little platform, and Steve looks back and up to see nothing but the blank faces of the ferry service’s buildings, dotted with dark windows. At least there are no people here on the weekends, it seems, and he is blissfully alone except for a few, grumpy looking gulls.

“Bucky,” Steve says, out into the air, then remembers Bucky’s most repeated lesson. “Or… The James River?” Steve frowns. The name is right, but what he’s doing doesn’t make sense. He looks out at the rock that juts out into the East River, remnants of a few old structures remain past the railing of the parking lot that he marched through, long since abandoned by Brooklyn’s earlier, failed terraforming efforts. It looks nothing like Buchanan.

“I guess I should be talking to the East River,” he confesses. “I’m looking for a friend. From Virginia. I’m worried I hurt him somehow, when I drew his picture. I don’t understand how rivers travel, but I just. I hope he’s okay. And if this is crazy. If I’m just standing here talking to myself. I’ll just. I’ll go. And I won’t worry about it anymore.” Steve looks down at his hands, then back out to the water. “I’m sorry Bucky,” he says, chest burning. “I’m sorry that you’re gone and I’m sorry that it was my fault. I’m sorry I didn’t understand. I’m sorry I didn’t have faith. Please…” Steve isn’t even looking at the water anymore, just leaning into his own arms, stretched away from the rail, like he’s holding onto it for dear life. “Please come back…”

“Excuse me,” a voice from behind spins Steve around and he nearly swallows his own tongue in surprise. He had been so focused he hadn’t heard the man walk up behind him. “You can’t be here.”

“Oh, right.” Steve’s face heats immediately when he remembers he’s trespassing. He swipes away the water in his eyes, and hopes he just looks like the wind had gotten to him. The man certainly doesn’t look like someone that works for the ferry service. His purple damask tie and tailored three piece suit look far too expensive. His sunglasses alone look like they are worth more than everything Steve owns. Still, something about his intense gaze exudes authority and Steve doesn’t want to cause any trouble. “Sorry. I’ll um, I was just looking for someone.”

“Mm hm,” the man says, looking painfully unamused and Steve just hopes he’s not considering whether or not to call the cops. “What did you say your name was?”

“Steve Rogers,” he says, and could have slapped himself for giving his real name so easily. “Nice to meet you,” he adds, because he may as well commit, and holds out his hand.

“Tony,” the man replies, and holds up his hand, palm out, in flat refusal. “I don’t do handshakes. I also don’t do suicides.”

 _“Excuse_ me,” Steve blurts out. “I’m not going to commit suicide!”

“You come here to talk about how you lost someone,” Tony points out to him. “And you look at the water like that’s where you’re going to find him? Excuse _me_ if I’m worried you’re going to cause me some problems.”

Steve makes a face. That might be one of the most New Yorker attitudes he’s ever come across. He must have had the sad misfortune of running into the guy that actually owns this side of the East River. “Look, I’ll just um. I’ll get going. Sorry for. The trespassing. There’s um. A hole in the fence at the parking lot.” Natasha would be so goddamn disappointed with him right now. He has a feeling she’s never done something quite so square in her life. “Thanks,” he adds, and makes his way back up the stairs. Tony doesn’t bother to step out of his way, so Steve awkwardly forces his bulk around him and then jogs up the stairs.

“Just don’t jump in,” Tony blurts up at him. “If you come back.”

* * *

Even he thinks he’s given up. Walking away like that, without an answer, and sinking back into his usual routine for the day feels like he’s broken free.

Then, the following morning he wakes at dawn, and is inexplicably drawn out of bed, into his jogging clothes and immediately down to the East River. He finds the same break in the fence, tresspasses through the same lot, and stands at the same rail.

“Come on, Bucky,” he mutters under his breath. “Where are you? You promised. You promised we’d be together again.”

It’s raining the next morning, but he still goes. Rains the following two weeks and he finds his way down over and over again.

Eventually his dark muttering turns into quiet conversation, as he goes over everything that’s happened since he came back from Buchanan. The squeaky floorboards he fixed on the stairs, the single, tiny mouse he managed to finally catch and release in the vacant lot down the street, and how it went with the fire marshal’s inspection of the boiler (horribly. Just _horribly._ )

It reminds him of sharing his childhood problems with the James River, back in Buchanan. Even though his problems are more grown up, even though it’s the East River, even though the cool breezy days mean summer is long behind him, it’s somewhat therapeutic to have this one sided conversation.

He runs into Tony a couple of times, but they don’t really talk. One time Steve even brings two coffees, expecting to see him there, and Tony looks confused when he’s offered the steaming paper cup. Mostly, the guy seems content to leave Steve alone, and Steve happily takes it as permission to continue trespassing. There’s a park not too much further down that goes right up to the water’s edge, but Steve prefers the isolation of this abandoned walkway.

“I drew you again last night,” he eventually says, and talks about the Brazilian online art tutor. “She just started offering mentorships,” Steve happily announces, the first day of December. “I think I’m really going to try this thing.”

Eventually, it starts to snow. Steve comes anyway.

“I drew my mom and dad,” he says, breath puffing out in front of him in wispy white clouds. “I’ve still been seeing Dr. Carter but she says that I’m coping so well these days, she doesn’t think I even still need therapy. Can you believe it?” Steve laughs. “I’ve been going to therapy for so long I don’t know what the hell else I’ll do with my Thursday afternoons if I stopped.”

Halfway through November, Clint gets suspicious of Steve’s dawn exercise routine. He has a hard time appreciating that anyone would rise at dawn, let alone go jogging, let alone jogging _in the snow._

“You’re welcome to join me,” Steve offers one day, when they stopped for lunch after a late morning workout at the gym. He means it but he’s also not sure how his conversations with the East River would go if Clint were to come with him.

Clint snorts, then coughs up half his sandwich which he had been in the process of swallowing. “Ugh, this is what I mean,” Clint says. “All this exercise. Bad for the health.”

Steve laughs. It’s just as well. Clint probably wouldn’t believe him if he told him about Bucky, about the cottage in Buchanan and the river, and how somehow, his little trips down to the East River allows him to find some kind of peace with leaving it all behind.

Steve finally finished number fourteen before the first of December. His therapist’s niece, Sharon, moves in and Steve is relieved he put the extra work into the unit. She’s a nurse, and was nearly moved to tears that Steve had installed in-unit washer/dryer unit with a sanitize setting. “We never leave the infectious disease ward with contaminated scrubs,” she explains, as Steve helps her carry the last load of boxes up from the rental truck on the street. “It just feels nice to be able to wash those kinds of days away, you know?”

“Oh, I know,” he laughs. She smiles back at him and he feels his face heat, then his heart clenches in his chest.

As soon as he can, he makes his excuses and leaves Sharon to finish settling into her new apartment. Steve already regrets renting out the apartment to her. Regrets telling Dr. Carter about it in their last session and regrets it when the crafty older woman hints that her niece is ‘on her own’ and it’s not fucking fair. Sharon is nice. She’s _nice,_ and Steve isn’t ready for it.


	13. Lovesick

“Clint’s been asking if he could rent out the cottage next summer,” Steve says, and shivers a little bit harder when he pulls his hood a little bit tighter. New York has apparently decided that winter would be a disgusting combination of slushy wet snow, ice, and rain for weeks on end. Steve is usually a trooper when it comes to running in bad weather, but he jams his stiff fingers back into his thin running hoodie and thinks this just sucks. “He mentioned checking in on you, if I wanted.”

It’s definitely colder than he can stand, and Steve has trouble finding any of his usual energy for some reason. Maybe because it’s Christmas Eve, and he still hasn’t texted Clint back on what he was going to bring to their orphan dinner. Clint and Natasha had both lost their parents too, and somehow it became something like a joke. “I wasn’t sure what to tell him.” Steve laughs but he feels grim, and leans over the rail, far enough to see the rocky ground directly below the cement landing of the old staircase. Oily water weeps over the edge of it, trailing dark lines all the way down. Steve sniffles before he finds his voice again. “He seems like he’s doing pretty well, though. He and Natasha seem really happy. You know I uh, I was kind of scared of her when he first introduced us? I think you’ll like her though.” Steve kicks the support pole for the hand rail, hears the metal make a dull thud against the toe of his sneaker.

The water doesn’t flow quite like the James River; it’s massive and slow, more like an ocean than a river, but the small eddies that swirl into the gaps left by the outcropping chatter in almost the same language. To Steve it sounds sarcastic and maybe a bit judgemental; the same language, but not like Bucky at all. “Well if you met her then you’d know.”

Steve hangs around for another five minutes before he finally gives up and jogs home.

* * *

“I didn’t want to bother you,” Sharon says, and Steve tells himself her cheeks are so pink from her walk up the stairs to his front door. “Nancy from number thirteen told me that you did a lot of the contract work here yourself and you might be able to take a look?”

“Oh it’s nothing,” Steve happily assures her, and grabs his toolbelt. He keeps it on a hook by his front door, just at the end of his coat rack, since there isn’t much point to putting it away. He follows Sharon down two flights to her own front door, and she leads him through her sparsely furnished apartment to the linen closet where the stacked washer/dryer are. “When did you say it started?”

“I noticed things weren’t getting as dry just yesterday. I do a lot of loads I guess, always cycling through my scrubs,” Sharon explains, and pops open the dryer. She pulls out a damp set and Steve feels his careful, neutral smile crack, like brittle glass. Sharon’s scrubs are all covered in cartoon prints, and she is explaining how long she’s run them for while Steve just zones out, holding a set with Captain America charging into imaginary villains with his shield held high.

“Anyway,” she says, snapping him out of his panic. “I’m worried I actually just burnt it out, running the sanitize setting so often. What do you think?”

Steve swallows. Right. The dryer hasn’t been working. “It’s a brand new unit,” he says, kind of thinking out loud. “It shouldn’t have failed already, no matter how much you use it. I’ll run the vent snake. Should have done that before I installed them. Just um. Wait here.”

Steve retreats quickly, and because he gave himself a task he has no problem digging through his hall closet and retrieving the lint snake he bought to clear out the building’s dryer vents. Once he has it in his hands though, he actually has to think about going back down into her apartment and his stomach hardens into a knot.

Sharon is nice. She’s nice and she’s _simple_ in that she’s here, right in front of him. She’s helped him convince Bertrand, the blind man in number one, to stop taking other people’s mail, and asks the mailman for help identifying his own. She actually found out he never even received packages, only ever hopes to, and Steve is embarrassed he never thought of that. Then he catches her leaving packages for Bertrand with small gifts — candy and books in braille, and he’s avoided her ever since.

Now, he’s headed back down to her apartment, maybe a little too eager, a little too helpful. It feels like a betrayal. He tries to keep his head down when he sends the fluffy brush down the lint catch of the brand new appliance, sneezes when he pulls up a huge clod of old lint from the couple who had moved out the previous spring, and that’s that. Sharon shoves the pile of damp clothes back into the dryer, the Captain America scrubs on the very top, and turns on the machine.

“You really are handy!” She beams. “I owe you one.”

“Hey, it turned on, we don’t know if it will actually work,” Steve reminds her, trying not to smile too widely despite the warmth of her gratitude. “If it really is broken you can use my machine until we can get the warranty guys out to fix it.” _What the hell was that!?_ There’s a perfectly good laundromat less than two blocks away on Berry Street.

Steve immediately turns red at the thought, and Sharon nods. “I still owe you though. Cup of coffee while we wait? I make terrible coffee, but we could go to that retro Diner on Berry. That one that looks like an old train car?”

No. Absolutely not. “Um, raincheck?” Close enough. Steve doesn’t really explain where he has to be that’s more important than the clear invitation for a date with the nicest girl he’s ever met. “Just text me if they don’t come out dry. Thanks for letting me know, though. I really hope this works.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says, a look of confusion crossing her face that she’s misread the situation, that maybe Steve isn’t the lonely, young landlord, the guy that their neighbors continuously point out to her and say, ‘he’s single, you know.’ “Sure,” she says, smiling anyway, unfazed by the obvious rejection. “Any time.”

It’s not really fair, but it’s the best Steve can do right now, so he sprints back up to his own apartment and locks the door behind him, as if that had any hope of saving him from the confusion roiling around inside his chest. “Fuck…”

It’s still early enough in the day, so he flings off his clothes and climbs into his second set of workout things since his first is already in the hamper. He freezes in the doorway of his bedroom, clutching the frame and trying to catch his breath. Behind him, still on the dresser where he had left it weeks ago, is the river rock from Buchanan. Bucky’s rock. Steve’s left it there, has gotten used to seeing it first thing in the morning, when he wakes up and climbs into his running clothes. Steve goes back to his dresser, snatches the stone and stomps out of his apartment. He trundles down all the many flights of stairs to the street, and quickly picks up his pace, holding it in his fist.

The weather has made a huge mess of things, garbage clogs the storm drains and dirty snow is piled up between the rows and rows of apartment buildings along his march down to the East River. It’s unnaturally bright outside after all that rain, sun reflecting under the cloud cover making the whole world feel silver and uncomfortable to watch without sunglasses.

The river is only two blocks away, which pass quickly under Steve’s determined stride. He crosses Berry Street, then Wythe, passes the vacant lot with its corrugated metal fence covered in graffiti just before trotting across Kent Avenue and stops at the chain link fence that circles the East River Ferry administration parking lot.

Usually he’s here at dawn, so he’s surprised to see cars parked in the lot and a few people passing by. “Fuck it,” he mutters, and ducks into the hole in the fence anyway, feeling conspicuous and out of place. He’s not sure if that Tony guy actually had any right at all to give him permission to trespass — he could just be another basket case like Steve coming down through the hidden little path between the buildings to get some sense of isolation from the city around them — but there’s a pitched battle waging inside himself that he can’t ignore. He quickly skips down a few steps and there it is.

The East River looks the same as always, nothing has changed, yet Steve can feel it in his soul that his life has come upon a fork. Bucky had once told him, way back in the early days of their renewed friendship that beavers in Virginia were critical to the health of a river. Steve had made some joke about beavers being assholes, blocking up rivers with their dams, and Bucky told him that was actually how new rivers were formed. One, persistent mammal could reset the course of an old river, or divert a section of it to cut a path through the woodlands to create a whole new one. With the new runoff, life will always follow, as the new river cuts its way into a permanent line in the earth. Steve’s eyes follow the East River all the way down, past the Williamsburg Bridge, then back up, where it hooks around the Lower East Side. It’s huge and powerful, water churning onward at a slow steady pace along its course, like a freight train.

The stone is heavy in his palm, warm from his own body heat, and practically crackles with the same sort of energy he feels coming off the water. Before he can second guess himself, he winds up for the pitch and hurtles the stone out into the East River. It makes two skips before it vanishes into the inky darkness.

Steve bites his lip, feels an intense heat flare up in his chest, fear that he’s losing his last remaining link to the person he set out to find. His hands tighten on the rail and he clenches his teeth. “Come on, come on, come on,” he finds himself chanting. “Please. I need you Bucky. I love you. You told me. You said names were important. Rituals. You have meaning to me, Bucky. Come on...”

Steve waits for a long time, waits until it grows too cold to stand still, waits until the first raindrops of the evening make fat heavy splatters against his forehead.

“Come on!” Steve cries out. “Bucky! I love you!” He doesn’t even care who might hear him, Tony or the police, or the people in the park on the other side of the ferry building. “I believe in you!”

The words are swallowed up by a wet burst of wind, and Steve startles when a pop of lightning cracks open the sky. If he had run down here looking for an answer, looking for a sign, then that was it. The East River and the James River are not the same person. Bucky’s precious stone, that traveled with him all the way from Buchanan, Virginia, that Steve treasured like a part of himself, is gone forever.

Steve releases the rail and puts up the thin hood of his sweater. It barely helps, since water is now coming down in buckets and Steve is soaked down to his core by the time he makes it home, numb and aching.

At least now Steve is free. No more river rock, no more Buchanan, no more Bucky Barnes haunting him.

* * *

Steve startles awake when another blinding pop of light winks through his living room. He shivers, feeling extra foolish that he had fallen asleep in his wet clothes, and pulls off his soaked hoodie as he listens to the sound of the storm picking up outside. “Oh, wow,” he whispers, and steps to the window just as the boom of thunder sounds after that flash of lightning. The rain is coming down in big fat drops, pounding against the windows after every burst of wind. Steve can’t help but give a smug grin when he sees absolutely no water seeping through the windows. He did a good job with all that weather stripping, just in time for the rainy season. It’s nice to feel proud of something he’s accomplished, to think to himself that he has handled one of his biggest regrets. The wound is still fresh but it’s clean, and healing.

Another dazzling blue light flashes through Brooklyn. “Ha. Do your worst!” Steve crows, then freezes when his lamps shut off and his ever-humming refrigerator goes dead silent. “Fuck.”

* * *

“It’s not just you,” Clint assures him. “Power’s out at my place too.”

Steve scrubs his face with his free hand. He’s going to have to reset _so many_ modems after this. It’s like the internet needs to be encouraged to bother coming back when the breakers in the building go out. “Thanks Clint,” he says, carefully rounding the landing the stairs to the ground floor. “Did you flip your breakers to make sure they don’t blow when it comes back on?”

“Sure did. Did you let Bertrand in number one know? He doesn’t have email, remember.”

“I’m heading down now,” he assures him. Clint’s funny like that, coming off like a complete wreck of a human being, but remembering details like that when it comes to taking care of other people. “Good luck!”

They say goodbye before Steve flips his phone around to use as a flashlight. It’s not exactly pitch dark, but he doesn’t need to risk a twisted ankle when he doesn’t have any internet to fall back on. Even as it is, he’s not sure what he’s going to do the rest of the evening. He certainly doesn’t want to burn his data on another art lesson.

Steve politely knocks on the Bertrand’s door, tells him about the storm knocking out the city’s power, deals with the lecture he gets from the old man about properly insulating the building’s electrical from surges like lightning strikes, then heads back up. A few tenants who didn’t get the email poke their heads out when he passes so he tells them the same story, warns them to turn off any unnecessary appliances for when the power comes back on, then miraculously makes it through his own front door without anyone stopping to ask him for help finding candles or flashlights. At that thought, Steve realizes he has a collection of flashlights he bought in bulk for this exact reason, and suddenly he has something that will occupy the rest of his evening.

* * *

Steve’s whole face squints when unfiltered sunlight hits his face.

He had distributed flashlights to all the tenants the night before, then ran downstairs to move all the bicycles from the basement into his own living room when Clint had texted him a report that neighborhoods near the East River were in danger of flooding. He wound up passing out on the couch at around one in the morning and apparently forgot to close his curtains. “Genius, Rogers,” he chides himself softly, then immediately coughs when his own voice scrapes through his raw throat. Steve hauls himself up, feeling disoriented from waking up in an odd place, and extra clumsy. His phone battery died sometime in the night, so he plugs it back in and — “Uh oh…” Still no power feeding through his wall socket. Did he shut off the breakers to his own unit? Steve shoves on his shoes and heads downstairs, still lightheaded. He really must not have rested well. It’s still early in the morning, just after dawn, and he sees no one on his trip down to the basement.

Which is flooded.

“Fuck.”

* * *

Three hours later and his building’s power safely reset, Steve plugs in his phone just long enough to get a five percent charge and calls Roto Rooter, hoping for the best. The storm apparently knocked out two cell towers in his area so his network connectivity has gone to shit and the wifi is about as reliable as getting a seat on the subway during rush hour. No more art tutorials for now.

Steve stares at his stack of supplies anyway, lazily drags his oldest sketchbook out from the stack of new ones. It’s not like he wants to pick at the scab that had been forming all night, while he battled the invasion of water into his building, distracted and exhausted by his short run in the pouring rain. He’s just curious is all.

Steve hasn’t looked at that one since Buchanan.

The sketchbook, still faded and warped from another flood, so many years ago, falls open in his lap, and Steve’s stomach clenches. It lands on the last image he sketched and Bucky’s smiling face glances up at him from the page, hands clasped together between his knees. His expression is soft and hopeful, like he’s waiting for Steve to do something spectacular with boyish glee.

Steve fucking misses him. Suddenly he can’t help it, and like Brooklyn’s overflowing tributaries, his eyes well up up and spill over. Steve cries until he exhausts himself, and falls asleep, even though it’s not even noon yet. When he wakes up, he thinks he might be hotter than he’s ever been, sweating buckets into the upholstery of his sofa, and barely manages to drag himself to bed before it finally occurs to him that he’s sick.

He sleeps for three days straight before anyone checks on him, the day after Christmas.

* * *

Apparently, Sharon had called Clint and Clint called Natasha and Natasha had called Clint _an idiot_ for not thinking to check on Steve when he couldn’t be reached on Christmas. Natasha would never be one to admit any kind of sentimental feelings towards the holiday, but maybe she just enjoys Steve’s company on Christmas day, and maybe Clint shouldn’t have assumed he was just too “busy” to even text him with a few santa hat emoji.

So the three of them had stopped by, and had found him naked on the floor next to his bed, shivering and pale. Clint winds up helping him into a hot bath, though Steve suspects the much smaller man could never have wrestled Steve’s huge frame into the tub by himself. The ladies must have helped him; Sharon is a nurse, after all.

“All that exercise,” Clint says, poking Steve in the ribs after he blearily started talking again in the steaming hot water. “Bad for the health.” He’s teasing him, but he looks nervous.

They help him into soft, flannel pajamas, the ones he usually only uses when he goes camping, and Sharon checks his vitals with a few, gentle fingers on his wrist and between his ears. “Drink this,” Natasha insists, after Steve makes it under his covers. Steve thinks belatedly that it’d been a long time since he’d last seen her. She’s grown out her hair, long red ringlets falling over her shoulders in great waves. She hands him a plastic travel cup with a long straw, and he nearly gags when he drinks down something thick and sour. “Old Russian recipe. It’ll get you back on your feet.” He can’t help but glance quickly at Sharon who only nods back at Natasha with a ‘couldn’t hurt’ expression.

Sharon makes sure to leave several bottles of pedialyte next to his bed, and several bottles of water. “When you asked for that rain check I didn’t think it would be as a patient,” she softly tells him, when Natasha and Clint are packing up to leave. Sharon squeezes his fingers and gives him an understanding smile. “Don’t worry about Charlie, I’ll make sure he doesn’t smoke in the stairway.”

“Thanks,” Steve sighs, finally finding his voice. “Thank you, Sharon.”

“Thank me by being a good patient,” she adds, shaking her finger his way. “I have a feeling you’re a stubborn one, and Clint told me about all those early morning jogs you like. Give yourself time to heal. Stay warm and hydrated. I’ll come by later with some soup.”

Soup is the last thing on Steve’s mind after they leave, and he winds up heaving Natasha’s Russian magic into the toilet. It gives him enough energy to guzzle some pedialyte before falling back into bed, and he sleeps the rest of the day away.

The next morning he wakes up feeling a bit more human. Apparently, whatever it was Natasha gave him had actually done the trick. Jogging clothes feel strange and scratchy over his oddly sensitive skin after living in his pajamas, but suddenly his apartment is stifling, and he itches with claustrophobia after being cooped up in his apartment for… how long? It must have been almost a week. He knots his sneakers, sits up to catch his breath, just from that small effort, but stands up anyways, determined.

“Shit!” Steve goes down, tries to catch himself on a side table, which flips over under his weight. He sits on the floor for five seconds, maybe ten, before he groans and rolls over, in a pile of his own change and his keys and his (now broken) sunglasses.

Standing back up seems like far too much effort so he leans against the wall and just sits there in his dark hallway. Being sick for so long has made him weak, and he miserably slumps over, defeated. Why is he really so panicked to go outside anyway? Hadn’t he decided that if he threw away that stone he’d move on?

Steve brushes his change into a sloppy pile beside him, tries to pick up the pieces of mail that scattered in a radius around his position. He isn’t terribly successful. He feels like he’s almost sinking into the floor, like all of his procrastinating isn’t leading anywhere but further into the hole he’s just barely peeking out of.

The sound of his old, creaky window opening spins him around in a spike of panic, but instead of a prowler, Steve finds a bird, hopping curiously down from the sill.

“Big fucking bird,” Steve sputters out, not exactly sure what he’s supposed to do about it. The bird is huge, with rusty red feathers and a powerful hooked beak. It opens its wings, but doesn’t fly away, just stands there with its pinions on display for a few seconds before folding them back up again and continuing to stare.

The frigid air from the winter outside makes it’s way through the open window, and Steve finds it refreshing enough to shakily drag himself up from the floor and over to the sofa. The bird makes a warbling sound, and his head pokes through the open window, permission to come inside. Steve smiles, and wishes he had the energy to collect some bread from the kitchen. “You’re a pretty good lookin’ fella. Have I seen you before?”

The bird cocks his head at the sound of Steve’s question, and Steve laughs. “Been pretty sick,” he confesses. “But I could use a pal right about now.” Looking more closely, he can see it’s not just a bird but some kind of _raptor;_ a hawk or a falcon. Extremely weird to see in Brooklyn, he’s pretty sure. It paces from side to side, just inside his window sill, anxious to come inside, then proudly fluffs out its spotted chest. It looks like it's waiting for something, regarding him solemnly in the weak, early morning light.

“I’m Steve,” he says, and the bird makes a _skree!_ noise at him in one hard syllable so Steve laughs. “Nice to meet you Sam.” So what? The bird just _looks_ like a ‘Sam.’ “Come on in. You must have missed migrating or something. I don’t know if hawks migrate.” The bird’s head goes back, affronted. “Not a hawk? A falcon? Isn’t a falcon a hawk? Am I rambling?” Of course he’s rambling. Sam apparently thinks so too because he makes three distinctive chirpy clicks, like the guy is laughing at him, and launches off the window sill, back into the New York morning.

Steve softly breathes out a helpless laugh, and lets his head drop. “Thanks for telling me my window was open, anyway.”

Natasha or Clint must have opened it when they stopped by. Steve turns on his television, sinks further into the sofa, and falls back asleep.

* * *

Steve doesn’t manage to help any of his tenants bring their Christmas trees down to the street this year, though surprisingly none of them complain.

Instead, Charlie brings him rigatoni soup, and Tera leaves him a basket of figs, apricots, and goat cheese. Mrs. Klein helps unclog Bertrand’s toilet after he accidentally dropped a bar of soap in it, and Sharon replaces the lightbulbs in the hallway that burnt out in the storm. Someone even flips the breakers when the power goes out, again. It’s nice, but his tenants worrying about him so much only heightens his unease about being sick, like he’s secretly on hospice and no one actually told him.

It’s an odd mixture of being comfortable enough to relax, but still uneasy, like any moment things will go horribly wrong for him.

* * *

Steve wakes up suddenly, drenched in sweat, and as he takes several sharp gasps thinks his fever has returned. “Nightmare…” he realizes, as the word leaves his mouth. He’s not even sure what it was about, but the lingering shaky panic of it is unmistakable. His burning face immediately cools, when another blast from the window pushes his curtains into his living room. Steve swears when he sees snow dusting the carpet.

* * *

As promised, Sharon returns to check on him several more times over the next several days, along with Natasha and Clint. When they finally bring bags of real food with them Steve has to suffer through eating small, conservative portions through sheer force of will. He knows he’d just make himself sick if he ate as much as he wanted, and he really, _really_ wanted just about everything he could get his hands on.

“Since you missed Christmas, we wanted to make sure you got something. This is from the three of us,” Sharon says, when she hands Steve a bright red envelope with little glitter snowflakes across the front. He takes it slowly, wondering how it had become the ‘three of us’ when he had been sick, but figures Sharon is just that kind of person. Easily makes new friends, even with someone as cagey as Natasha. When he opens the Christmas card, a big happy Santa, he finds a coupon inside for a house cleaning service. It makes him laugh, because he’s been _sick_ and can’t they give a fella a _break_? He knows his place is a little messy, he just doesn’t have the energy to clean it up.

“It’s a dump,” Natasha flatly declares, and Steve laughs harder.

They take the remains of their drinks to the living room (Sharon allowed him half a beer that he’s been nursing all evening) when Natasha gives him a large, flat box, wrapped in Captain America wrapping paper. “What’s this?” Steve asks, without bothering to open the paper to check because who would be giving him a wrapped gift?

Clint smiles, and looks shyly into his own lap. “The building knows you’d been sick. Wanted to do something nice for you. We all chipped in. Even Charlie. Nat was the one that picked it out,” he says, pointing hard at his girlfriend to divert attention away from himself.

Natasha just gives Clint one of her most sarcastic eye rolls, but bumps her boyfriend’s shoulder in a playful way. “I swear, it’s like none of these people have heard of Youtube reviews.”

Steve’s cheeks burn so red that he doesn’t know what to say when he tears off the paper and finds a brand new digital artist’s tablet. It’s like speaking some exotic, mystical language when he reads the product description on the box. “Wacom Cintiq 13HD Interactive Pen Display…”

“You’ve been drawing so much lately. Thought you might want to give this a try.” Clint shrugs. “I mean, unless you like old fashioned tools.”

“Thank you.” Steve hugs the box to his chest. After years of rehabilitation and therapy after his accident, no one encouraged Steve to draw again. After only a couple of months Clint and Natasha had not only noticed, but given him one of the most valuable artists’ tools on the market. Encouraging him, like he’s some kind of prodigy. Like his mom had, when he’d been younger. He doesn’t know what to say. “Thank you.”

* * *

When Steve wakes up the next morning, it’s well past dawn. He putters around his house, then leaves his apartment for the first time since he came down with his flu to check for signs that something would go inevitably wrong. Ultimately, he finds nothing is actually amiss for once, and comes home panting but satisfied that he’s done something productive. When he rounds his hallway and comes into his living room he catches sight of Sam outside of the window, so he slowly approaches him and opens it up. “My door’s always open,” he says cheerfully. Sam’s head turns almost all the way over, so Steve laughs, and walks away, letting the bird decide if he wants to come in or not. It’s pretty irresponsible, really. Who wants a hawk in their own house?

The next day Charlie smokes in the stairwell and the fire department gives him a three hundred dollar fine. Basically, it’s business as usual, and Steve can’t say that he isn’t a little bit relieved.

When Steve gets home he catches Sam outside of his window. “Hey! I have to help Hielem bring his groceries up the stairs. He sprained his ankle on the subway! Can you believe it. Anyway,” Steve suddenly feels a bit embarrassed, watching this bird’s huge eyes watching him, so he brushes the back of his head with the flat of his hand. Sam’s yellow beak quickly chatters, and Steve gets a sense that he’s being _tsked_.

“It’s like that, huh?” Steve rolls his eyes at the falcon (which, as it turns out, is a completely different animal from a hawk.) “I’ll be back!”

* * *

The pencil swishes in broad, satisfying strokes down the fresh paper, giving motion to one long, elegant feather after another. Steve sticks his tongue out even further, adding the shadows beneath them, then sits back to admire his work. “It’s _awful_ ,” he says, then laughs. It’s hard to draw his new friend from memory alone, since Sam won’t sit still long enough for him to take a photo and refuses to actually model inside his house. He can only stand keeping the window open for so long before he has to shut the falcon outside again.

It’s New Year's Eve, and Steve has big plans to stay inside with his thickest pair of socks and his new tablet. The sketchpad in his lap is really just for a warm up, since he hopes Sam will stop by long enough for —

Steve sits up at the tapping on his window sill, then bounces over landing on his knees right in front of his radiator. He throws open the window and grins. “Happy New Year!” The falcon leaps back at his outburst, feathers literally ruffled, and Steve sits down, laughing. “Sorry. I’m excited for this. New beginnings and all,” he explains, feeling a sudden bashfulness over the confession. “Want to see what I’m working on?”

Steve flips his sketchpad around to show Sam the less-than-masterpiece. The falcon lets out a blustery _skree!_ before he bursts into flight away from Steve’s window. “Wow, thanks buddy,” Steve snorts. He probably just surprised him. He’s just a bird, after all, and a wild animal. He doesn’t need Steve’s overly large nose shoved in his face.

Still. The rejection stings. _So much for new beginnings,_ he thinks.

For the next few hours, Steve distracts himself by fiddling with the settings on his new Cintiq, watches maybe a dozen Youtube tutorials on different brush types, and techniques for using the _incredibly fucking cool_ stylus. It’s already late by the time he finally stands up the stretch, and he has to flex his neck several times to get the kinks out. All that downtime from being sick has made his muscles feel like lumpy mashed potatoes, and he knows he’ll have to get back to running soon, even if he doesn’t reach the East River on his route. That thought only triggers a minor spasm of pain in his chest, the old wound finally healing.

He turns on a few lights, rubs his eyes from the sting of watching such a bright screen in the dark of his apartment, and ducks his head to look out of the window. Some excited neighbors have lit off a few, crackling fireworks since the sun went down, but he still has about an hour or so before midnight. Steve relaxes next to his cool radiator and shivers. He may as well turn it on, since it doesn’t seem like Sam is going to come back. Besides, Sharon would be cross with him if he relapsed now.

Was his sketch really that bad? Steve laughs at himself, at how hopeless he is if he’s taking art criticism from a bird. Just as he stands, Sam pulls up short of his window, but instead of alighting on his windowsill, patiently waiting for Steve to open up, he remains in flight, awkwardly bumping into the glass.

“Geez, buddy, you in a rush,” Steve scrambles up and hauls his window open. It sticks from the cold, but he finally wrestles it all the way up and stands aside, just as the bird dives into his home. “Whoa!”

Inviting a falcon into his tiny apartment was a terrible, no good, very bad idea. Sam darts from one corner to the next, but he’s built for speed, and his wings desperately flap to keep him from crashing into the walls. Still, Steve loses a few pieces of art hanging from his walls and a there goes his tray of loose change again. Sam lets out an irritated _skree!,_ deafening in the enclosed space, before he finally decides he’s through making a fool of himself and shoots like a laser beam through the open window.

“Holy shit!” Steve gasps, still flattened against the wall next to the window. “That was amazing!”

It doesn’t take him long to clean up, and he finds a few of Sam’s discarded feathers amongst his loose change when he finally gets it all scooped back into the dish. He spots a quarter under his ottoman, so he nudges it aside to see what else might have made its way under it, then falls to his knees.

Sitting there, next to a few coins, shining and wet, is the stone from Buchanan. Steve could never mistake it, smooth and round, flecked with silver, with the glistening white seam down the middle. Steve whispers, “Bucky,” and suddenly the whole world comes apart.


	14. Where the Rivers Meet

It’s almost midnight, and Steve sprints down South 8th Street with everything he’s got. It’s dark, the only people out are drunk, rowdy, and looking for trouble, but it doesn’t stop him. It’s snowing, and cold, and Steve’s legs are already numb by the time he crosses Berry, and burn with exhaustion when he crosses Wythe. He nearly gets hit by a car when he sprints across Kent Avenue, but he doesn't slow down, scrambling along the chainlink fence, clawing for the hole in the darkness of the empty parking lot. Steve can barely think through the static in his brain, can barely process what he’s doing.

He just going off of faith.

Steve sprints the length of the parking lot, trips when he starts down the stairs but catches himself on the handrail before he can take the brunt of the spill. He recovers quickly, leaps down the last set, and crashes into the rail that overlooks the river.

His voice is hoarse but loud when he screams out, “Bucky!” over the river. Steve is gasping for breath, and looks up and the down the river, looks for any sign that the river had heard him, and coughed up his best friend. His lover. His soulmate. He feels giddy and overwhelmed, his heart thudding out of his chest, and not just from his mad sprint from his front door.

“Bucky, I’m here! I got your message!” Steve laughs, looks hard out over the water, catches sight of the traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge, hears the chug of the midnight ferry carrying revelers across the river for a better view of the fireworks. “Bucky!”

Steve waits, catching his breath, wiping away his tears, trying not to laugh. He knew it. He _knew_ this wasn’t over, that the moment on the dock when Bucky fell back into the river wouldn’t be their very last. Knew there was no reason to give up yet, not for real. He should never had doubted Bucky for a single instant. Isn’t that what Bucky had said? That what he believes matters? “Buck! I’m here! I’m right here!”

“Oh, I’m going to regret this,” a bored voice says, and Steve yelps when he spins around to find Tony, right behind him.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Steve curses, clutching his chest. “Tony! What the fuck?”

“Okay, first of all, language,” Tony says, giving him a sharp look. “Secondly, um.” Tony struggles for a moment, presses his mouth into a thin line, then swipes a nervous hand over his spectacular goatee. “Here.”

Steve catches the tiny little sticks that Tony shoves into his hands, nearly drops one, then stands up straight, trying to figure out what he was just handed. “Sparklers?”

“Happy New Years,” Tony grumbles. It’s awkward, because he’s trying to sound like he doesn’t care, but his voice shakes and he glances away, like he doesn’t want to let Steve see that he clearly does.

Steve looks at the little aluminum sticks in his hands and stupidly asks no one in particular, “How am I supposed to light these?”

“Tony,” someone says, and Steve flips around again, back towards the river. This time though, all he finds is Sam, perched on the rail and staring right at him. “Give the man a break.”

“I don’t even like mortals,” Tony mutters, and reaches inside his expensive suit jacket to pull out a cheap plastic lighter.

“Yeah man, you keep telling yourself that,” Sam says, and Steve can’t tear his eyes away, even when he opens his hand to accept the lighter. Sam’s voice is strange, so incredibly present, and so masculine and modern, just how you'd expect someone from Harlem to sound. It’s just that it’s floating out of a bird’s beak, is all. Without him even opening it. “The guy grew on you just like he did on me, and you know it.”

Tony makes a disgusted sound, and crosses his arms across his chest.

“Um. Thanks,” Steve says, because he hasn’t entirely lost his manners.

“Don’t mention it,” Sam says, which is impossible, but somehow Steve isn’t surprised. “Don’t mind Tony. His bark is worse than his bite.”

“I… yeah, I kinda got that,” Steve says, then he nods, putting the pieces together. “Cousin Tony. Bucky told me he was staying with a relative.”

“Oh, believe me I know. Fifty years and no one one calls me Tony. Now, everybody’s doing it,” Tony remarks, almost to himself, but deflects by suddenly pointing at the falcon. “But that one was Harlem until you went and gave him a new name.”

“Damn right,” Sam says, and then punctuates the puffing of his chest with an actual bird noise.

Steve leans his hip into the rail next to the bird, still clutching the sparklers and now the lighter in both hands. “Harlem, huh? That’s a pretty ritzy name for such a little falcon.”

“Oh, someone’s brought jokes! Cool man, cool,” Sam’s voice spikes with playful sarcasm and Steve chuckles. Sam suddenly flaps his wings to dance backwards on the rail when the first of the New Year’s Eve fireworks boom in the distance.

“Welp, that’s our cue,” Tony says, and hops up on his toes, like he had been annoyed that the conversation hadn’t involved him for the past two minutes. “Come on, Sam,” he says, and turns to head up the stairs at a lazy, loping pace before he calls over his shoulder. “Four’s a crowd!”

Sam’s wings bunch up around his face, almost like a shrug, and Steve waves at him, because it seems only polite. “Good luck, Steve.” Sam’s talons sing off the metal railing when he detaches and flies up and away, zooming out over the open water and into the night.

“Heh,” Steve shakes his head and looks down at the gifts. He puts them in his pocket with Bucky’s stone, dips under the guard rail, and drops onto the rocky outcropping beneath the cement platform. It’s so dark that he uses his phone to pick his way across the uneven ground, and he laughs, already getting a sense of being back in Buchanan, trying to find his way through the woods down to his family’s dock.

Steve can hear the water better than he can actually see it, the steady, rhythmic slapping of the gentle waves against the bank. The actual water line is so dark it’s impossible to tell exactly where it starts until he gets closer. Steve shivers when a gust of wind brings the scent of smoke, and a giant green rocket lights up the night sky over Manhattan. Steve glances up at it, feels the light on his own face, then settles down as close to the water as he can get without putting his foot in it. “I’m so glad I can celebrate the New Year with you,” he says, holding the end of one sparkler in the steady flame of the cheap lighter. “I have so much to show you.”

The sparkler bursts to life, first in a bright shower of blue and then to a more elegant silver. Steve holds the second sparkler in the first’s heat, and soon it catches alight and joins in. Steve sighs, content to wait, to take as long as he needs to for Bucky to come back to him. It’s not easy, loving someone so completely, and somehow it’s the easiest thing in the world. At least he has one hell of a view. Steve watches the tip of the fireworks show, happy even though he can’t see them all from so low on the ground.

“Hey,” Bucky says. Steve isn’t surprised. He knew he’d be there, right at that moment.

“Hey,” Steve answers, and holds up one of the sparklers. Bucky takes a seat beside him, picking it up and letting it light up his face as he gets comfortable on the rocks.

“Wow, it’s freezing here!” Bucky shivers in his t-shirt. It’s the Captain America one, which Steve also knew he’d be wearing. Effortlessly, Steve puts his arm around Bucky’s shoulder and pulls him in close. He smells like Buchanan, like long grass and old trees, like a sun baked dock and the riverbank.

“Wish I thought to bring a blanket,” Steve says, huffing out a laugh. “I was kind of excited.”

“Took you long enough,” Bucky says. “I got lost.”

“Were you in the storm?” Steve says, putting two and two together. “After I sent the rock back.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “I was the storm. Sorry about your basement.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time you made a mess of my place,” Steve snorts, and Bucky groans.

“You finally figured it out?”

“That you came up that last summer? Looking for me when I never came back? Yeah, I put that together. Feel kinda bad, talking so much shit about you.”

Bucky laughs and Steve finally looks at him, really looks at him, and not with the sideways furtive glances he had cast Bucky’s way when he first arrived. His face is turned up to the sky, lights up with both color and wonder at every rocket burst. His jaw is at a perfect angle, his long hair perfectly mussed. The dimple in his chin is pointed straight up, and he laughs when one of the rockets goes off overhead and makes a smiley face among the stars.

“These are so much better than the ones in Buchanan, but so much farther away!”

“They’re perfect,” Steve gasps, and he’s crying all of a sudden, even though he’s not sure he’s ever been so happy. He has all his memories now too, so he would really actually know that. “You’re perfect. You’re here. Bucky. I can’t. I just missed you _so much,_ and —”

Bucky gathers Steve’s chin in his hands. “Shh,” he whispers, his cool breath puffing onto Steve’s mouth. “I knew we’d make it. I had faith in you.” He presses his soft lips against Steve’s and Steve’s pain bubbles to the surface. He drops his dim sparkler right into the water where it promptly sputters out, throws his arms around Bucky’s shoulders and pulls him in. Steve can taste Bucky’s sweet mouth, crushed against his own, can taste both their salty tears. Bucky laughs into his mouth, which lets Steve finally laugh as well and soon they are laughing and holding one another through both their grief and their utter joy.

It takes a long time for them to finally separate. Mostly, it’s because it’s so damn cold, despite their best efforts to find heat between their bodies. “Let’s go to your place,” Bucky suggests, breathing into Steve’s mouth after breaking from a kiss.

“Sure,” Steve says, ameable as he always will be, forever, with Bucky there to love him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that' s the whole fic! Thank you so much for reading! 
> 
> I'm so proud to have completed my second Stucky Library Big Bang, and had a chance to collaborate with such incredible, talented artists! Last year's Bang was my first foray into fandom and fanfiction, and this year was even more inspiring after all the new relationships and bonds I've formed in the community since such a warm welcome.
> 
> A few things to note, the James River really does run through Buchanan Virginia, and there is a rail bridge that crosses over it. I fudged some details about the downtown area, mainly to have the shops and shop owners fit my narrative, but the streets are pretty much the same. Bucky's previous names were also real, along with Steve's neighborhood in Brooklyn. You can follow his course on Google maps to see how he reached the East River every morning.
> 
> I really hope you enjoyed this fic as much as I enjoyed writing it!


	15. Artwork: Milollita

Fullsize Artwork from Chapter 6

 **[Steve & Bucky enjoying an evening together papercraft by [@milollita](https://milollita.tumblr.com/)]** 


	16. Artwork: Koreanrage

Fullsize Header artwork, Chapter 9 and Chapter 11

**[Artwork by[@koreanrage](http://koreanrage.tumblr.com/post/164333106520/and-the-last-piece-for-my-collaboration-on) for the Stucky Library Big Bang 2017!] **

 

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	17. ARTWORK: Shaish

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New art from shaishart.tumblr.com

The fantastically incredible and generous [Shaishart](http://shaishart.tumblr.com/post/169374225969/resins-christmas-presents) sent me this beautiful works for Christmas! I am very happy to share them here with the fic. Enjoy! 

 

**Author's Note:**

> All chapters of this fic will be posted by 21 August! 
> 
> Please stop by my [Tumblr](https://resinonao3.tumblr.com/) to say hi!


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